Fighting Fontasy: Stonehenge

Irregular series looking at Old School Fantasy typography...
 

TSR | Gygax | Classic Warfare 1975

Citadel Miniatures Logo 1979 by Albie Fiore

The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan | TSR | 1980

Warhammer Circa 1983

Dungeon Dwellers Heritage | c. 1981

The Lichway | Albie Fiore | White Dwarf 9 | 1978

Caves and Caverns | Judges Guild | 1982

Palladium RPG | 1983

Advanced Civ, |Avalon Hill | 1991

In the 80s, before commercial graphic design became something that happened on computers,  the only way to get fancy lettering without laboriously and hugely skillfully hand-drawing it was to use dry transfer or rub-down lettering, such as is/was produced by Letraset or Normatype. Some of these typefaces took on the job of defining of a genre. Whether this was due to various companies copying each other or all trying to communicate a similar set of ideas through their design, it's hard to say without actually interviewing everyone concerned (if you were responsible for any of the designs above and happen to be reading this, drop me a note, I'd love to hear what went into the work).

How to do Rub Down Lettering | Helvetica | Letraset

The case in point - a rubdown lettering called Stonehenge published by Formatt, now infamous across the universe as the logo of the most successful toy soldier company since those little green Army Men guys.  Notably, Stonehenge has some forms characteristic of a Roman 'rustic' lettering or capitalis rustica - the flourishes on the V, W and the extended L all point to that being the basis for the design, although these forms range from 1st - 8th Century. the A is particularly quirky letter - which is more of an uncial type. Picking exactly what historical samples served as a model for Stonehenge is more PHD level research than a simple blog-post, it seems to be an amalgamation of 8th C calligraphic forms. Yet the designer also appears to have rationalized the use of curved strokes from calligraphic writing to a more inscription, carving, based model, where straight lines tend to dominate see the M, etc.

rustica

uncials

Stonehenge also has serifs (the little 'ticks' at the end of letter strokes) which originate from Roman stone-carved letters and are a common feature of commonly used typefaces like Times New Roman and so on. So in its form Stonehenge seems to embody an alternate history, where stone-carved letters were based not on the civilized, orderly models of Roman inscriptions, but instead on the parochial, rustic, barbaric letter forms, which in the alternative history have become the dominate form, and subsequently used in monumental inscription.

But Stonehenge isn't a straight typographic revival of old historical forms given an alternative twist. The forms are distressed - given jagged edges, broken parts and rough edges - designed to make it look like had been printed off an ancient battered metal casting - the indentations are consistent with damage, rather than say rough edges of paper that something like the universally derided Papyrus uses. Putting too much and repeated weight on metal or wooden type (until the age of off-set litho, most typography was produced via relief printing) will cause the serifs and thin strokes to split off and crack, the edges also get dented from being knocked around - all of which naturally happens to physical type over time. This distress also plays into the physical hand-work of using rub-down type, parts of letters can be missed off, or broken by not applying an even pressure. The distressed edges of Stonehenge is playing to the advantages of the medium and turning the serendipity of the process into something that feeds back into the design.

So not only are the letterforms based on a pseudo-historical model, they have been made to look like they very material of them has been used and abused for a very long time, giving it an even stronger and more unusual 'antique' feel and that's possibly why it's a firm favorite of the 80s fantasy art-director.

It's also worth noting that many designers didn't use the rub-down transfers at all, but instead hand-drew the lettering, using the type-specimin as a model, adding yet another level of quirk, strangeness and charm.

To my knowledge, there have been two digital revivals of Stonehenge, both distributed for free.

 Moria Citadel  by Russ Herschler of Dragonfang - onlne gaming supplies retailer and archive of many an adventure sheet.  Russ was kind enough to point me in the right direction for the origin of his font (Stonehenge, Formatt). I used a slightly modified version Russ's font on the classic "OLDHAMMER: In Battle There is No Law" T-shirt and there is also Satans Minions by Mickey Rossi

P.S. If anyone out there in internet land has any rub-down sheets of Stonehenge, I'd be interested in acquiring some!

Destroy: Power Armour T-shirts

Perfect for the moshpit, demolishing a shed, taking up the patio, playing a wargame with your mates, gang-fighting in a turf war, growing your beard, hunting around vinyl record shops on around the East Village, planning interplanetary conquest or drinking a craft ale.

The new destroy t-shirt on Zhu Shop US - exclusive, but what is it all about?

Destroy: A History of a Time to Come

destroy [zhu] 2015

Blackletter. In the middle ages before printing was invented, everyone used to copy out books by hand. But of course, not everyone could read - only those with an education, and they tended to be members of the Church. Blackletter as a form developed out of the scriptorial tradition, the rigours of writing with quill on parchment - it is essentially a sequence of rhythmical down strokes and flicks.

blackletter

Once printing and mass production of the book arose, Blackletter, as the dominant form of writing, became codified as typefaces of the kind used by William Caxton (1476) and Johannes Gutenburg (1439) for the first European printed books, and the letterforms continued to dominate the written word for a few hundred years.

fractur fette

Around the 15th-16th century, Blackletter became hugely unfashionable in parts of Europe, including England, mostly due to The Renaissance and the love of all things Roman - so their letterforms began to dominate. In England, the older, more worn out, cheaper typefaces used by low cost publishers for books of less value and a cultural split between the high, learned, refined, cultured, civilised, of the Roman Antiqua and the low, debased, popular, parochial Blackletter formed...

The country-mans lamentation for the death of his cow English 15th C. Blackletter |via

However Blackletter continued to be used in Germany for serious as well as popular works, and remained for quite a long time, often being used alongside the now more familiar Roman-derived Antiqua (as the Broadsheet ballad above illustrates.

In a time when people actually cared about typography as a cultural activity more than just snarking at Comic Sans MS a wide-ranging cultural debate about Antiqua vs. Blackletter held in central Europe. During the 1940s Blackletter forms were greatly used by the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei for propaganda purposes (and I think therefore feels 'Germanic' or 'Gothic' to the Europeans who went full-bore Antiqua) but subsequently denounced by Adolf Hitler for being too German. Yes. Really.

New York Times | Blackletter since 1851
The Times of London, however, converted to Antiqua thanks to Stanley Morrison in 1931s

And I think from NYT through to NY Gangster Rap - a kind of regionalism. So that brings us nearly up to date, Blackletter type can still be seen on pub signs, cider bottles, tobacco tins, rock and rap album covers, gang tattoos, beirgartens, mexican stakehouses, newspapers, RPG products and the sides of Proto Space Marine helmets busy carpet bombing the planetary surface of Lave...

Dave Andrews | Rogue Trader | 1987 | reason for the holes.

Nobody expects the Space Inquisition! Well, apart from people who frequent this blog, who frankly just scrolled past the fascinating and illuminting history of typography looking for the 1980s gaming reference whilst humming Wild Boys by Duran Duran to themselves (go on, admit it). It's one of my all time favourite images from Warhammer 40k. As far as I know, no miniature was ever produced that looks like this guy. No rules for carpet bombing battlecraft ever written. It's like an entire gaming universe compressed into a tiny atom, awaiting the next big bang, an unexplored parallel dimension, radically different to the one we know yet somehow familiar.

But just what is the word "destroy" written in blackletter doing decorating the side of some galactic space warriors defensive armour in the year 40,000?

Military Folk Art

One reading is that the word 'destroy' may be part of a tradition of decorative military folk art, provisionally starting around WW1 and continuing right through to today.

Nose Art, painted on military aircraft more often than not tends towards pin-up girls, Memphis Belle being among the most famous. Perhaps a slightly depersonalised recurrence of the Chivalric lady's favour, the ideals of courtly love and honour - and indeed some nose art were painted as reminders of 'girls back home' whilst simultaneously identifying an aircraft and its crew, whose flight jackets may also carry the image, the genuine intermarriage of identity, group and symbol that most branding companies can only ever pay lip service to.

Alternatively the designs appear aggressive and animalistic - the shark tooth patterned Nose Art above a prime example stemming from WW1 German fighter planes alongside kill / mission markers. Often these can appear more comical than frightening, but they could be a relic of the totem animals found in many warrior cultures,

Warhawk with Sharktooth Nose Art

Blood Angels in Corvus Armour with Sharktooth Helmet Art

Blood Angel miniatures with Sharktooth nose art | via the inimitable Jonas

While the shark-tooth pattern that we see on fighter aircraft.  We can see the warrior-animal thinking taken to its extreme in 40ks Space Wolves

 It certainly appears that military folk art is part of the visual language of Rogue Trader Space Marines - and it must be said - other forms of power armour, such as that worn by renegades and orks. The lettering in Dave Andrews original piece appears to be hand-painted, perhaps because it is hand painted, but perhaps it is also representing hand painted 'graffiti' which lends some weight to this reading.

But pure writing, as we see in Dave Andrews, rather than the primarily representational forms of Military Folk Art seems reasonably rare until the Vietnam War (1955-1975), where Helmet Graffiti became widespread:

Vietnam Helmet | via

This development during the Vietnam War intersects directly with the history of the mass produced marker pen - the "Magic Marker" first invented and sold by Sidney Rosenthal in 1955 in the US, and the modern felt-pen invented by Yukio Horie of the Tokyo Stationery Company, Japan in 1962. The medium is the message - the enabling factors of new writing technology finding expression.

The 69 and the Military Marker via

So iconic did the practice become that film maker Stanley Kubrick chose that particular language to graphically represent his film Full Metal Jacket (1987) the frisson between the signs of the poster and the film are an essay unto themselves (the nature-nurture duality of the phrase born to kill for a movie 50% about military training)...

Born to Kill | Philip Castle | via

Similar graphic territory is scouted out by Alan Moore and Brett Ewins in their 1983 Rogue Trooper strip "Pray For War" - where Rogue (who in a later incarnation dons the name and the helmet graffiti Friday ) meets a lost Souther whose helmet proclaims his self-identity Pray for War...

Pray for War | Brett Ewins (art) Alan Moore (writing) | Rogue Trooper 2000AD | 1983

This admixture of warriors name, identity and military equipment seems to go back thousands of years. Thinking Seax of Beagnoth, a 10th Century Anglo Saxon blade inscribed with a set of Futhark (the runic alphabet) and the name Beagnoth. It's unlikely that Beagnoth, like Gunnar, Helm, Bagman, Sting or Stormbringer is the name of the item itself, and historians are unlikely to ever decide whether Beagnoth is the name of the owner of the blade, or the signature, the brand-name of the manufacturer.

Beagnoth

Destroy The Brand

So another reading of Dave Andrews 'destroy' Space Armour, may be that 'destroy' is the name of a manufacturer of space suits and powered armour. A brand, perhaps like 'No Fear',  or Destroy Skateboards, RoZ favourites Disturbia or some other biker/sports/punk/goth crossover brands, gone into the manufacture of space suits.

Significantly for my design, fashion designer John Richmond incepted his street wear brand Destroy in 1987 - he same year as Rogue Trader was published. Richmonds streetwear label fused a rock and roll biker sencibility with an activel, clean sports wear aesthetic. If Dave Andrews was making an intentional reference it would have required to have the finger on the pulse of British fashion design. Possible.

Destroy | 1987

It's also interesting to note that Ace from Doctor Who made her debut in 1987 and Red Dwarfs Dave Lister in early 1988. Heavily patched up leathers becoming a British sci-fi signifier for slacker / rebellious yoof. Something in the water? Can anyone hear the distant drum machine of indie-pop-industrial-lite Grebo? 

Destroy | 1987

Richmonds 'Destroy' label entered similar graphic territory as BOY london and continued the punk legacy of  St. Vivienne Westwood' and St. Jamie Reid. Barney Bubbles work with Hawkwind. However, unlike St. Viv, Richmond filed a Trademark on the word "destroy".

Destroy. Jamie Reid (graphics) Vivienne Westwood (shirt)

My t-shirt production company Spreadshirt do their due diligence - and so have pulled my design as it might infringe John Richmonds ownership of the mark. Anybody who knows me also knows I'm a big defender of peoples intellectual property, so while I am somewhat miffed by not beign able to release the t-shirt, I fully support the legal and economic process that allows this to happen.

Arguably the trademark is dormant - John Richmond isn't selling Destroy branded clothing, and arguably, if anyone was to do so, nobody would assume that the garment had been designed by John Richmond, it's lost currency through inactivity. However, I say "arguably" but I don't have the means or inclination to pay for a professional to make that argument on my behalf.

Richmonds solicitors have yet to respond to my request to clear the use of the word. The trademark is due for renewal in March this year, and there is a chance they will let it drop, in which case the shirt will be released in the EU. Until then, it's US only.

But hey, John, if you're reading this, drop me an email, let's rebuild Destroy. There has never been a better time for the brand to make an impact.

Supermodern destructivism

We live in the age of supermodern destruction, where "film critic" Lewis Beale talks of the spectacle of destruction as a kind of pornography, but without acknowledging Ishiro Honda's Gorija as Hiroshima and pretending that the post-WTC imagery is something new, has he even seen a single 1970s disaster movie, not even Irwin Allen's Towering Inferno ?  How did this guy even get a job writing about cinema with absolutely zero knowledge of it past the last 5 years?

That Beale chooses the sensationalist word porn over the more critically adept and meaningful spectacle seems to belies his own fetishisation of violence. Pornography involves people, the spectacle of destruction involves things, confusing things and people sociopathic tendencies and the transference of desire that's the literal meaning of a fetish. The phrase "destruction porn" reeks of the kind of vacuously desperate, foot-stamping,  attention-seeking that has become rampant in our fragmented and hypernetworked reading experiences. From tawdry clickbait headlines and a to fill the endless void of the internet with meaningless distracting "content". Instead of culturally informed critics expanding our understanding of subject matter, we get armies of jibbering self-important idiots pointing at stuff they have no critical understanding of screaming look at me! look at me! I show you thing!

Destruction as an aesthetic response is not new in the Supermodern landscape, we can talk JG Ballard, Punk, David Carson, Godzilla, Cornelia Parker, Burroughs cut-ups and countless other works that celebrate the end of things, like a gnostic release from the hell of the material world - if anything the spectacular destruction of the inanimate and symbolic apparatus of society remains one of the enduring motifs of the post-nuclear age, not a fleeing, momentary knee-jerk reaction to any particularly single social or historical event, but reveals itself to be one of the great meta-narratives of Supermodernity.

Sketch: Work In Progress | Graphite on Laserprint | [zhu] 2015

The classic, controversial  'destroy' t-shirt black and blue, limited to 66 pieces world wide, and available in the US only:

• Zhu Shop US / RoW $20

Don't forget there are also an ever decreasing number of Rogue Trader, Evil Empire and Oldhammer First Edition, Oldhammer ov Khaos shirts which are available through Zhu Shop EU


As ever, please note I only design these shirts, and am not responsible for their manufacture or delivery. Please familiarise yourself with spreadshirts generous returns policy in your area before ordering. Either I've put on weight, or Spreadshirt sizes tend to come up "small", so usually order one size up. This advice may not be appropriate if you are not an English Male with a serious biscuit habit. Please consult your fashion advisor.

White Dwarf The 80s Soap Opera

Was 1980s US TV series Dynasty the unlikely design inspiration for the 2012 White Dwarf revamp?

Yes, it was.

It appears that 1980s TV series Dynasty and subsequent spin off The Colbys provided the design inspiration for White Dwarf magazines recent revamp (since #394). Through use of  colour and typography the new White Dwarf is eerily familiar to aficionados of trashy camp 80s pop-culture. The new White Dwarf masthead is relentlessly set in the yellow / orange / gold end of the spectrum and utilises the the exact same font as the Dynasty titles - Aurora, designed by Jackson Burke in 1960. Both designs also use just the one font throughout the layout, not only for the masthead "White Dwarf", as the programme title "Dynasty" does, but for the featured contents of the magazine, as the TV show does for the actor names as well. Compare with something like Doctor Who, which has a unique logo for the series title and separate font used for the episode title, with earlier White Dwarf that likewise have a similar split between masthead and cover copy.

Not only that, but I'd suggest the new art direction is also mirroring the fantasy of wealth, ownership and the conspicuous consumption of status-symbols that Dynasty invaded our 1980s analogue televisions with. The traditionally painted fantasy scene, with its long tradition going back to the depiction of historical battles and pulp sci-fi novel covers - and a long standing motif of the White Dwarf cover - has been replaced by the highly mimetic, representational imagery of product photography which is not at all unlike the sequences of high end consumer lifestyle goods paraded behind the characters in the title sequence of Dynasty.  Although with the Dwarf it is toy soldiers, not diamonds, Rolls Royces or real estate that define the corpus of the Games Workshop consumerist fantasy. So the White Dwarf cover has gone from imagery that depicts a fantasy world of the imagination, to imagery that depicts an aspirational collection of objects. Not to mention there are some genuinely laugh out loud examples of Freudian imagery, from oil wells to champagne bottles, to big guns and long necked daemons to consider...

And you thought Space Marine shoulder-pads were ripped off Judge Dredd, but no, GW have finally let slip. It was powered armour  = power dressing all along...