Hi Guys,
Pardon me for crowdsourcing an answer to a question that’s been bugging me all week. If anyone can give me the correct answer, I’ll see if I can make it worth your while with a $5 Amazon card or something.
Does anyone know what font was originally used to create this logo?
I know that some guy re-created the font and it’s widely available as “FullHouseFont,” but it was originally made for the show from an existing typeface that nobody seems to quite remember the name of. Anybody got any ideas?
Thanks!
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Are you sure it wasn’t just a custom logotype job rather than an off-the-shelf font? I see there are very subtle differences between the two "L"s and the two "U"s, so in the very least it was probably tweaked by hand.
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I’m told it was done on a Vidifont machine at Laser Edit in Burbank. They had many fonts that they’d purchased for various titling jobs, and this was just one of those, but nobody can remember its name. I think they licensed typeface packages from a few different sources.
You’re right, that one does look more custom-drawn than one would expect, though.
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You might try this “What the Font” tool if you can find a relatively high-res and high-contrast version of the text, but you’ll be facing long odds if it’s something that hasn’t been in widespread use for a long time.
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Have to agree with @Brainspore that this looks wholly handcrafted. Usual cheating tool WhatTheFont didn’t result in anything useful, but you might want to try their forum in case some super type nerd can help.
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Upon close examination of the opening credits over all 8 seasons, I’m beginning to wonder if they didn’t just use a hand-drawn cel (or whatever the equivalent might be) for the main title logo. The actors’ names are titled in a completely different (though similar in vibe) typeface, which could be the font they actually titled the show credits with. So the logo might have been simply custom-designed for the show. Nobody seems to remember.
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Yeah, we tried “What The Font” first, but that one didn’t even come up with the Fonty-Come-Lately FullHouseFont. I think you guys might be right about this being a custom job.
Back in the day all the best sitcoms would spring for custom typography.
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Oh… no reason.
(whistles innocently)
Actually, we’re updating the logo for a new show for some entity whose name sounds like Schmetflix. A new show that’s called something like Schmuller Schmouse. We’re doing a few tweaks to the typeface to try to make it subtly more modern, and it occurred to someone in the office that maybe we should see if it was an actual pre-existing typeface that needed to be licensed or something.
PM me if you want me to PayPal you some beer money, guys. Thanks!
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Those were the days. For Will & Grace we used… hmm… well, something simple and off-the-rack with the occasional italicized vowel. For The Mentalist we just used pretty much vanilla Helvetica. And for Clipped we used a 3D-rendered Bauer Bodoni.
I feel so cheap now.
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Would there perhaps be an invoice if it were a custom job, or would it have just been part of someone’s hourly or salary duties?
So you’re the title designer for every show ever?
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I actually ripped off the Cheers one for a local business that wanted to brand themselves with a kind of “family-friendly liquor store” vibe. (The pink wasn’t my idea, but hey.)
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If they actually had it made by a graphics company there’d be an invoice somewhere, but this was 28 years ago. We were feeling pretty lucky that we found as much archival stuff as we did. The main titles were always shot on film, and we found that negative in the salt mines, so that was good. But all the old actual episodes only exist on 1" tape masters.
My boss is the guy who titled the pilot, so he remembered the machinery and the venue (long since closed), but he has no memory if the logo was hand-drawn or not. Oh, well.
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Ha! I didn’t even design the titles for the aforementioned shows upon which I worked. I was just around at the time. Clipped was the one I had the most input on, and it still wasn’t my choice.
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I wish I could help more, this sounds like a fun mystery.
It is probably outof the question to cross reference all the foundries that billed the studio in +/- 3 years of that tape… And employment records for people that may have worked on it (based on region) could be had from the IRS… But you’d have to be Mulder/Sculley lucky to get anything useful.
Any sign in/sign out docs for the film?
(All those repeat letters are different, it is almost certainly a mod or custom, so good luck)
All good suggestions, but with the evidence pointing to it probably being a custom job (which would have been work-for-hire, wholly owned by WBTV), I think we can safely assume that nobody needs a license fee, and we can cheerfully stop caring.
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