Help with a Font please

[lakeview770]

Hi can anyone shed light of this font please of the number 156

 

Andrew

[Dave Searle]

Hi Andrew,

 

The closest match I can see comparing the fonts on my Windows 7 machine is "Arial Black", but using a lower-case letter "l" rather than a "1".

 

Other contenders are : Browallia New, Helvetica-Black and Utsaah (again all using the lower-case letter "l")

 

Cheers

 

Dave

[BernardTPM]

P.O. shaded letter & number transfers are made by HMRS transfers http://www.hmrs.org.uk/transfers/list.php See at the bottom of the list, sheets P3, P4 & P5 (depending on size).

[wagonman]

Don't forget that PO wagons were hand-painted by skilled sign-writers, many of whom used their own fonts, or at best copied from a card. Being hand-painted the lettering lacks the uniformity of a typeface as we understand it.

[adanapress]

Like the man says, signwriters working from a reference card, but that card wil have inspiration from letterpress typefaces of the period, and an 1890s one thats a good fit is 'Century Bold Italic'. We still see one from this family even today, in the plain Roman, in kids school books usually called 'Century Schoolbook'. There are others similar. In passing, a font is what you baptize babies in, type comes as the fount of all knowledge. That error was first made by some electronics loony, either in IBM or Adobe right back at the beginning, I still havent forgiven them! There were said to be 18,000 letterpress metal typeface designs for the English language

[PaulS]

Many PO liveries used fonts that pushed the letters closer together than normal - an effect that most word processing packages can replicate, usually via the Format>Character options.

[Adrian]

Can't find an exact match but the best suggestion for matching the 5 and the 6 is "Zipolite Fat Italic"

http://www.myfonts.c...lic/glyphs.html

 

Unfortunately the 1 isn't a good match so you'd have to use something else.

 

For finding a match on fonts I can recommend trying what the font, you can upload an image and it tries to find a match

http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

 

If you have a smart phone then you can get an app and upload straight from the phone camera.

http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/mobile/

 

Which is what I did in this case just taking a photo of the computer screen focussed on the 156.

[eastwestdivide]

... In passing, a font is what you baptize babies in, type comes as the fount of all knowledge. That error was first made by some electronics loony, either in IBM or Adobe right back at the beginning, I still havent forgiven them! There were said to be 18,000 letterpress metal typeface designs for the English language

Fighting a losing battle there I suspect. A lot of sources give fount as the British English and font as the American English version, so for "electronics loony" read "American" (not too much difference then!).

Others would argue that font strictly refers only to one size+style of a typeface.

As an aside, font is related to the French fondre for "melt", as in foundry: you still occasionally hear "type foundry" for a firm that sells typefaces, whether metal or electronic.

Just to confuse the matter, the French word for font (in the typographical sense) is police if on a computer and fonte if in metal, according to Larousse. While the baptismal font is a plural, fonts baptismaux.

 

Diversion over!