| Category | Sans-serif |
|---|---|
| Designer(s) | Aldo Novarese, Akira Kobayashi |
| Foundry | Nebiolo |
| Date released | 1962 |
| Re-issuing foundries | Linotype, URW |
| Design based on | Microgramma |
| Variations | Microgramma Microstyle |
The Eurostile type font style is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Aldo Novarese in 1962. Novarese originally made Eurostile for one of the best-known Italian foundries, Nebiolo, in Turin.
Novarese developed Eurostile because although the similar Microgramma, which he had also designed, came with a variety of weights, it had only upper-case letters. A decade after he had designed Microgramma, Novarese remedied this flaw with his design of Eurostile, which added lower-case letters, a bold condensed variant, and an ultra narrow design he called Eurostile Compact, for a total of seven fonts.
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Eurostile is a popular display font. Its linear nature suggests modern architecture, with an appeal both technical and functional. The squarish shapes with their rounded corners evoke the appearance of television screens of the 1950s and 1960s. As such, it has found some popularity in contemporary graphic design, as well as in science fiction novel and film artwork.
In the URW version, there are also Greek, Cyrillic, subscript and superscript, box drawing characters. The family has 16 fonts in five weights and three widths, with condensed fonts on regular and heavy weights; extended fonts on regular and black weights; complementary oblique fonts on black, bold, heavy, heavy condensed, medium, regular, regular condensed.
Eurostile DisCaps is a small caps version of the font. The family comes with one width in regular and bold weights, without obliques.
Eurostile Relief is a shadowed version of the font designed by URW Studio.
Eurostile Stencil is a stencil font based on URW's Eurostile black extended (D), designed by Achaz Reuss.
Linotype began distributing Eurostile decades ago, and during the early 1980s, it worked together with Adobe to digitize the fonts in PostScript format. During the digitization process, the super curves were flattened.
Although the font family is based on the Microgramma font, some of the characters do not follow the styling of the family. These characters include non-letter characters like integral, infinity, pilcrow; letterlike symbols like @, copyright mark, registration mark; and accents such as cedilla and the tilde.
The family includes ten fonts in three weights and three widths. Condensed and Extended fonts do not have oblique or demi weight counterparts. It supports ISO Adobe 2 character sets.
Eurostile LT is a variant of Eurostile by Linotype. It uses squarer designs for non-letter characters like integral, infinity, pilcrow; letterlike symbols like @, the copyright mark, the registration mark; and accents such as cedilla and the tilde. However, the circle in circled letters (@, Ω) remained circular, which was not fixed until Eurostile Next. The asterisk was redesigned to use six points instead of five. Some numerals, such as "1", were redesigned with a straight tail instead of an angled tail for use in Japan.
In all, the family includes 11 fonts, adding an Outline Bold font to the original Eurostile family by Linotype. It supports ISO Adobe 2,Adobe CE, Latin extended character sets.
The Square 721 font from Bitstream is very similar to Eurostile although its proportions are slightly different. Square 721 is available in 2 weights and 3 widths each.
Europe is a variant of Eurostile with designed at TypeMarket in 1992–1993 by Alexey Kustov. The family includes 16 fonts, adding Shadow Demi, Shadow Oblique, and the missing oblique counterparts to the original Linotype family. It supports Cyrillic characters.
Eurostile and Eurostile Bold (URW versions) were distributed with Microsoft Office 97, Microsoft Works 2002, Microsoft Home Publishing 99, Microsoft TrueType Font Pack 2. Electronic versions of these and all other Eurostile typefaces can also be purchased on-line directly from Linotype GmbH and URW in several systems, including OpenType, TrueType and PostScript.
Eurostile Extended has been used extensively in the music industry, where it has featured in album cover artwork from U2, Ash, The Supernaturals, Eminem, Pendulum, and several dance compilations from Warner. Eurostile Extended 2 can also be seen in the cover artwork for Marilyn Manson's 1998 album Mechanical Animals. It was used by Westlife on their first two albums, Westlife and Coast to Coast, and is currently used by Argentine Pop band Bandana & electrotango band Tanghetto as complementary typography to the band's logo.
Variations of Eurostile are popular in television. Doctor Who used the font for the credits during the Second Doctor era (1966 to 1969, with Patrick Troughton in the lead role), and again in cast and crew titles from 1987 to 1989. The BBC One holding slides from 1976-83 were in Eurostile. Eurostile Bold Condensed was used in the later logo of the TVS news programme Coast to Coast. It was also used for Tyne Tees Television's idents from 1969 to 1989. Eurostile—and the Microgramma Extended Bold font on which it is based—was the primary font used in the science fiction series UFO, created by Gerry Anderson in 1969. All of the vehicles and clothing bearing the logo of the series' secret organisation SHADO used the font, in addition to the main titles. Eurostile was also used in the title of television shows such as Ironside, Adam-12, Star Trek Enterprise and can be found in several video games such as Homeworld, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, Tekken, Splinter Cell, and Driv3r.
Sports television, in particular, has made significant use of Eurostile; Fox Sports, NFL Network, Comcast Sportsnet and Versus all use or have used the font for its on-screen information, with Comcast Sportsnet, Versus and Speed (a Fox Sports-owned channel) using it as recently as late 2011. As of fall 2011, Eurostile is not currently used by any nationwide sports broadcaster, having been superseded by other, narrower typefaces.
Eurostile can also be seen in the fashion world, as it is the font type for the widely known (and commonly mis-interpreted) clothing company fcuk, or French Connection — United Kingdom. It is also the corporate branding for French Printemps department store chain.
Eurostile is also used on most FIA GT cars for the car numbers. It is also often used on the sides of British police vehicles for signwriting. Eurostile Bold was the typeface of choice for the instruments in the majority of Volkswagen's passenger cars from the introduction of the mk2 Golf to approximately halfway through the production run of the mk3.
Eurostile is a corporate branding font for Toshiba and Diadora. The retail version was authorized by Toshiba Europe GmbH to URW, where Eurostile Black OT was sold.[1] Eurostile Extended Bold is used in the CASIO and Roland Corporation JUNO logos. Eurostile is also used for the logo of Colgan Air, Roadcycling.com, Roadcycling.mobi, and the Eurovision Song Contest. The NBA's San Antonio Spurs use Eurostile in their logos.
Eurostile is used in Canadian Journey series of Canadian dollar bank notes.[2]
Eurostile Extended 2 is used as the cutscene subtitles in the Star Wars videogames, The Force Unleashed and The Force Unleashed 2. Eurostile is also used in the title of the game Homeworld and Homeworld 2. The StarCraft series also use Eurostile.
Eurostile was used in Deus Ex: Human Revolution as the main font style of the game, including the Picus Network tablet papers.
In recent installments of Ratchet & Clank, Eurostile is used for most of the text in the game.