A pleasant drive along Font Avenue
WARNING: this post contains more waffle about fonts. It also contains lots of cars. If you are allergic to either, move right along. I am probably only writing this for my own self-gratification.
So, the identification of fonts on the UK road fund licence tax discs in my last post has led to this: numberplate fonts.
(As with all these pictures, click to enlarge; I'm trying to display them all at the same size in one page.)
On the left, we see my still-magnificent-after-five-and-a-half-years Intergalactic Battlecruiser, dating from 2007. On the right, it's the 1992 Fiat Uno my brother had when he was about 18. There should be a noticeable difference in the numberplate font; mine, being a product of later than 2001, uses (as it has to) the narrower Charles Wright 2001 font, whereas that picture of the Uno was taken before this updated font had even been devised, and uses the original Charles Wright font that was first introduced round about 1935.
The CW2001 font was devised in readiness for the registration style change of September 2001, in which the old prefix letter (J = August 1991 to July 1992, for instance) was replaced by the current two-digit indicator (07 = March 2007 to August 2007, followed by 57 for September 2007 to February 2008, which means we're currently at 13, and I wonder if, with superstition still gripping the nation as it unfortunately does, sales spiked in February with the last of the 62 plates, have taken a dive now, and will recover in September when it clicks round to 63). CW2001 was supposed to be completely uniform for all cars and in all uses, but given the attention to detail I can give when geeking over subjects nobody else can geek about, no sooner had this new font been launched than I noticed there were subtle variations. Note the 5 in YF55YBB and BZ58SLN. The second, admittedly, is a fake registration - Z cannot appear in the first two letters and these appear to be used only for promo shots, but show the extra angle on the 5. I consider the first (YF55YBB) to be the canonical version, and out there can be found two versions of this font: one is Mandatory, which has more characters but is less accurate - witness the sharp angle in the M that the Intergalactic Battlecruiser doesn't have - while the other, more accurate version but with only the characters needed to make a plate in the first place, is UK Number Plate.
The old Charles Wright font seemed to have a number of variants, in a time when a lot more freedom was allowed on numberplate styles. According to the people at Autoshite, who are dedicated to keeping old nails on the road, different car manufacturers, or groups of manufacturers, had their own variants on the Charles Wright style. One I remember very well was the Volkswagen-Audi variant:
On the top row: two Volkswagens and an Audi from the bad old days when they tried to fob us off on this side of the Channel with left-hand-drive wipers, but being chunky German cars I suppose it suited them to have a chunkier version of the Charles Wright font on their plates. The variation seems to be in the 1 (extra serif), 3 (obvious angled top) and 7 (curved slope); for comparison on the bottom row I've shown three plates in the most standard Charles Wright style I could find, starring a Honda Prelude, an Austin Maestro and a Ford Cortina. Shitetastic.
For what I think is a second variant on this style, I introduce you to another couple of motors that were once mine:
That's right, the good old Lancia Y10 I had when I was a teenager - and the shabby Sherpa that was Fire & Forget's transport to the Ruskin Arms (amazed that it got us there and back!) Notice the different font? It's that odd hourglass shape of the 8 that does it - and in case it's not clear, the photo of the Nova (I had one of those as well, two years newer, in white) shows it very clearly - it's from Wikimedia Commons and it's huge. As for the Maestro van, I reckon that must be the same style, given that it's the same D as on the Sherpa - and the sharp, straight diagonals on the 2 match what I'd expect from the 8. (And this Moggy Minor confirms it. Also, looking further through Autoshite, it seems this style isn't as rare as I'd first thought.) No idea if this was actually a Charles Wright variant, but we will see. And I suppose the same goes for this one:
I know a right-hand-drive NSU Ro80 is rare enough (I'll bet it didn't have the original engine) but that "slightly 80s" font (on a 1973 car) is one that seems to be a bizarre hybrid of Charles Wright and the next style I'll mention. It looks a lot less out of place on the Escort.
Best of all, this one has an official name:
Featuring, an Austin Metro, a MkII Ford Transit and - no, your eyes do not deceive you - a Talbot Tagora! - this one is the holy grail, of sorts, for Autoshiters everywhere, particularly those who are trying to restore a 1970s or 1980s car to its original spec, and usually generates a round of applause whenever a car is seen still showing this plate style. It's called SERCK, it's very square (almost "digital") with a very distinctive shape of 4, and seems to have gone horribly out of fashion some time in the late 1980s, with only aftermarket plates that didn't look quite right from Halfords and other such vendors available afterwards - and they were modern acrylic plates, whereas the original SERCKs were stamped out of an aluminium sheet. Annoyingly, I've never been able to find anything even remotely close to the SERCK font - or even the very SERCK-esque font that Pitch Shifter used on the Infotainment? album (which must have a name). The best I've managed is A1 Show Plates' generator that can make an approximation by selecting "Euro Style" - a very good approximation, admittedly, but still not quite the real thing. And that plate creator is done by combining images, there's no font embedded in the page.
Now onto the three that are very definitely not Charles Wright...
Number one is this far more rounded style, which was very common, pretty much until CW2001 was imposed on us; my black Golf sported this style until I replaced its rather scummy plates with new CW2001s. While the rounded characters (C, G, P, 3, 6, 0 etc) are clearly distinct, right-angled letters (E, H, L, T etc) aren't going to look any different from Charles Wright - and those that end in an angle (A, K, V, X, Y etc) have a very short straight section so the angle never meets the baseline (I think the blue Cortina shows this best) - and I'm sure I've seen some Charles Wright plates that share this same characteristic. Again, I don't think this font has a name, certainly not one that I've been able to find, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it turns out to be "Charles Wright Round" or words to that effect. Now, as for the differences (or lack of them) between this rounded font and the original Charles Wright, this next one is far more distinctive:
B and D, you'd say, are fair game for a serif, given that's what adorn the Charles Wright 2001 B and D in the name of legibility. But this font, that I'd usually associate with 1960s and 1970s cars (and probably older), took it to new heights. J gets a short one-way serif at the top, just like some typewriter fonts do (including the one I'm writing this post in before it's changed in the final edit), but E, F, P and R look very weird and L is just plain wrong. This same font gave us a serif on 1 as well as a distinctive split 4; if there is such a thing as a useable version of this font then I'd only go looking for it for purposes of completeness!
But we end with the one that's one of my favourites, for some reasons. Apparently this final rounded font was the original that was used since numberplates first became a legal requirement in the UK, round about 1903, and was pretty much unchallenged until Charles Wright's 1935 creation. Nowadays it's pretty much disappeared; I can't remember seeing it used too many times on 1980s cars, as I will now quite deliberately demonstrate...
So. No serifs, but a very chunky G, and the numbers are particularly distinctive; the 3 has an angled top, and there are sharp points in the 2, 5, 6 and 9 as well, and the slope of the 7 has a pronounced curve. For some reason, I associate this font mainly with the chod that farted out of the British Leyland factories (when any cars were being built at all because the workers usually went on strike) in the 1970s - even though it seems the one with the weird serifs fits that bill even better - and so on the top row, I've given three examples of the Morris Marina, described by its ultra-nemesis in the third picture as "the unpleasant log laid by British Leyland after communism crept, like an itchy red blanket, across the shop floor" - and that unpleasant log, with its huge arse, precambrian engine and terrifying handling that was poor even in its day, was just as awful as anything the Eastern Bloc could throw at us. To make up for that, though, and the fact that I actually like this plate style (to the point where I'm genuinely annoyed that it's no longer available), I've provided three more pictures of this fine old-school font, starring a brown Vauxhall Chevette, a MkII Escort and a Datsun Cherry, none of which are any more recent than 1980. And given that this is the font that predates Charles Wright, why it couldn't be the one that's used on new plates made for pre-1973 cars where it's still legal to use black-and-whites, is beyond me - it looks far more appropriate than the slightly SERCK-ish font that's actually used, which is a bit too 1980s.
But rejoice... this last font is out there in proper font form! It's been recreated as Lutz Headline, and has two slightly different forms, with different width M and W, and a nasty (not to be used) serif-toting I and J. The pointy numbers are all there, but if it's going to be used for numberplates, it needs to be done with a capital I instead of the serifed 1 - otherwise, it's about as close to perfect as I've ever seen - only the Q is slightly off, as can be seen here (just about), but it's not as if there are too many Q plates out there. The South Bank Centre has seen the potential of this font for headlining purposes - and has gone the whole hog, embedding it into their website. All I'll say is that it can be extracted, but I will not say how.
Autoshite has been an absolute goldmine for the purposes of writing this post - I might even register there and see if any of them know if there are versions of the fonts out there that I can't find, whether they have names or - like Lutz Headline - were unnamed and anonymously authored until the mid-1990s. Two users there are particularly worthy of massive hails - bram77, who's posted most of these photos as "recently spotted where I've been with my camera", and Trigger, who provided one picture but who also has a Flickr site full of old magazine road tests, mainly from the 1970s and 1980s - in which I can see how the Morris Marina was sharply criticised in 1975, when it was still on sale and only four years old, for the exact same vicious flaws that have seen Jeremy Clarkson and his cohorts have been dropping pianos on quite a few of them 30-odd years later.
The Font Now Known As Lutz Headline isn't a million miles away from the font used on road signs before Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert developed those we know today, and is superficially similar to Johnston, the ubiquitous London Underground font (which owes just as much to Gill Sans). The Kinneir-Calvert font that we are all familiar with, non-drivers included (because who's never seen a road sign?) is Transport, with those extra few tall characters in a subsidiary font, Motorway.
Being an avid collector of such fonts, I've gone looking for the foreign ones as well - a fair few of which are listed in those two Wikipedia pages, usually for road sign purposes, and which I don't need to go further into here; however, a few more worth mentioning are Numberplate France, which is one of several that are seen on French cars, even today; Numberplate Belgium, which is rather more representative of Belgian plates as a whole from when they were much narrower than all their neighbours; FE-Schrift as seen everywhere in Germany (and other countries now, such as Malta, South Africa and Uruguay) which took over from the old DIN 1451 font that is still used for road signs; Numberplate Italy, used since Italy transferred to full-size rear plates, and which is somewhat similar to one of the French fonts; Kenteken, the Dutch font used since time immemorial and which looks very similar to Gill Sans; Numberplate Switzerland, with the Swiss pathologically dedicated to neutrality by using a different font to everyone else just as they do on their roadsigns; and finally, Myriad, the latest font for Norwegian numberplates, replacing the SERCK-ish monstrosity that was current when I was in Norway, and which in turn superseded the use of Trafikkalfabetet, still seen on Norwegian road signs.
As a reward for getting through all this, I will treat you to a musical outro. Here's John Shuttleworth telling us what he really thinks of his Austin Ambassador.
(Yes, that's the same man who gave us Jilted John, who was so upset he cried all the way to the chip shop.)
Aren't you all glad that's all over.
So, the identification of fonts on the UK road fund licence tax discs in my last post has led to this: numberplate fonts.
(As with all these pictures, click to enlarge; I'm trying to display them all at the same size in one page.)
On the left, we see my still-magnificent-after-five-and-a-half-years Intergalactic Battlecruiser, dating from 2007. On the right, it's the 1992 Fiat Uno my brother had when he was about 18. There should be a noticeable difference in the numberplate font; mine, being a product of later than 2001, uses (as it has to) the narrower Charles Wright 2001 font, whereas that picture of the Uno was taken before this updated font had even been devised, and uses the original Charles Wright font that was first introduced round about 1935.
The CW2001 font was devised in readiness for the registration style change of September 2001, in which the old prefix letter (J = August 1991 to July 1992, for instance) was replaced by the current two-digit indicator (07 = March 2007 to August 2007, followed by 57 for September 2007 to February 2008, which means we're currently at 13, and I wonder if, with superstition still gripping the nation as it unfortunately does, sales spiked in February with the last of the 62 plates, have taken a dive now, and will recover in September when it clicks round to 63). CW2001 was supposed to be completely uniform for all cars and in all uses, but given the attention to detail I can give when geeking over subjects nobody else can geek about, no sooner had this new font been launched than I noticed there were subtle variations. Note the 5 in YF55YBB and BZ58SLN. The second, admittedly, is a fake registration - Z cannot appear in the first two letters and these appear to be used only for promo shots, but show the extra angle on the 5. I consider the first (YF55YBB) to be the canonical version, and out there can be found two versions of this font: one is Mandatory, which has more characters but is less accurate - witness the sharp angle in the M that the Intergalactic Battlecruiser doesn't have - while the other, more accurate version but with only the characters needed to make a plate in the first place, is UK Number Plate.
The old Charles Wright font seemed to have a number of variants, in a time when a lot more freedom was allowed on numberplate styles. According to the people at Autoshite, who are dedicated to keeping old nails on the road, different car manufacturers, or groups of manufacturers, had their own variants on the Charles Wright style. One I remember very well was the Volkswagen-Audi variant:
On the top row: two Volkswagens and an Audi from the bad old days when they tried to fob us off on this side of the Channel with left-hand-drive wipers, but being chunky German cars I suppose it suited them to have a chunkier version of the Charles Wright font on their plates. The variation seems to be in the 1 (extra serif), 3 (obvious angled top) and 7 (curved slope); for comparison on the bottom row I've shown three plates in the most standard Charles Wright style I could find, starring a Honda Prelude, an Austin Maestro and a Ford Cortina. Shitetastic.
For what I think is a second variant on this style, I introduce you to another couple of motors that were once mine:
That's right, the good old Lancia Y10 I had when I was a teenager - and the shabby Sherpa that was Fire & Forget's transport to the Ruskin Arms (amazed that it got us there and back!) Notice the different font? It's that odd hourglass shape of the 8 that does it - and in case it's not clear, the photo of the Nova (I had one of those as well, two years newer, in white) shows it very clearly - it's from Wikimedia Commons and it's huge. As for the Maestro van, I reckon that must be the same style, given that it's the same D as on the Sherpa - and the sharp, straight diagonals on the 2 match what I'd expect from the 8. (And this Moggy Minor confirms it. Also, looking further through Autoshite, it seems this style isn't as rare as I'd first thought.) No idea if this was actually a Charles Wright variant, but we will see. And I suppose the same goes for this one:
I know a right-hand-drive NSU Ro80 is rare enough (I'll bet it didn't have the original engine) but that "slightly 80s" font (on a 1973 car) is one that seems to be a bizarre hybrid of Charles Wright and the next style I'll mention. It looks a lot less out of place on the Escort.
Best of all, this one has an official name:
Featuring, an Austin Metro, a MkII Ford Transit and - no, your eyes do not deceive you - a Talbot Tagora! - this one is the holy grail, of sorts, for Autoshiters everywhere, particularly those who are trying to restore a 1970s or 1980s car to its original spec, and usually generates a round of applause whenever a car is seen still showing this plate style. It's called SERCK, it's very square (almost "digital") with a very distinctive shape of 4, and seems to have gone horribly out of fashion some time in the late 1980s, with only aftermarket plates that didn't look quite right from Halfords and other such vendors available afterwards - and they were modern acrylic plates, whereas the original SERCKs were stamped out of an aluminium sheet. Annoyingly, I've never been able to find anything even remotely close to the SERCK font - or even the very SERCK-esque font that Pitch Shifter used on the Infotainment? album (which must have a name). The best I've managed is A1 Show Plates' generator that can make an approximation by selecting "Euro Style" - a very good approximation, admittedly, but still not quite the real thing. And that plate creator is done by combining images, there's no font embedded in the page.
Now onto the three that are very definitely not Charles Wright...
Number one is this far more rounded style, which was very common, pretty much until CW2001 was imposed on us; my black Golf sported this style until I replaced its rather scummy plates with new CW2001s. While the rounded characters (C, G, P, 3, 6, 0 etc) are clearly distinct, right-angled letters (E, H, L, T etc) aren't going to look any different from Charles Wright - and those that end in an angle (A, K, V, X, Y etc) have a very short straight section so the angle never meets the baseline (I think the blue Cortina shows this best) - and I'm sure I've seen some Charles Wright plates that share this same characteristic. Again, I don't think this font has a name, certainly not one that I've been able to find, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it turns out to be "Charles Wright Round" or words to that effect. Now, as for the differences (or lack of them) between this rounded font and the original Charles Wright, this next one is far more distinctive:
B and D, you'd say, are fair game for a serif, given that's what adorn the Charles Wright 2001 B and D in the name of legibility. But this font, that I'd usually associate with 1960s and 1970s cars (and probably older), took it to new heights. J gets a short one-way serif at the top, just like some typewriter fonts do (including the one I'm writing this post in before it's changed in the final edit), but E, F, P and R look very weird and L is just plain wrong. This same font gave us a serif on 1 as well as a distinctive split 4; if there is such a thing as a useable version of this font then I'd only go looking for it for purposes of completeness!
But we end with the one that's one of my favourites, for some reasons. Apparently this final rounded font was the original that was used since numberplates first became a legal requirement in the UK, round about 1903, and was pretty much unchallenged until Charles Wright's 1935 creation. Nowadays it's pretty much disappeared; I can't remember seeing it used too many times on 1980s cars, as I will now quite deliberately demonstrate...
So. No serifs, but a very chunky G, and the numbers are particularly distinctive; the 3 has an angled top, and there are sharp points in the 2, 5, 6 and 9 as well, and the slope of the 7 has a pronounced curve. For some reason, I associate this font mainly with the chod that farted out of the British Leyland factories (when any cars were being built at all because the workers usually went on strike) in the 1970s - even though it seems the one with the weird serifs fits that bill even better - and so on the top row, I've given three examples of the Morris Marina, described by its ultra-nemesis in the third picture as "the unpleasant log laid by British Leyland after communism crept, like an itchy red blanket, across the shop floor" - and that unpleasant log, with its huge arse, precambrian engine and terrifying handling that was poor even in its day, was just as awful as anything the Eastern Bloc could throw at us. To make up for that, though, and the fact that I actually like this plate style (to the point where I'm genuinely annoyed that it's no longer available), I've provided three more pictures of this fine old-school font, starring a brown Vauxhall Chevette, a MkII Escort and a Datsun Cherry, none of which are any more recent than 1980. And given that this is the font that predates Charles Wright, why it couldn't be the one that's used on new plates made for pre-1973 cars where it's still legal to use black-and-whites, is beyond me - it looks far more appropriate than the slightly SERCK-ish font that's actually used, which is a bit too 1980s.
But rejoice... this last font is out there in proper font form! It's been recreated as Lutz Headline, and has two slightly different forms, with different width M and W, and a nasty (not to be used) serif-toting I and J. The pointy numbers are all there, but if it's going to be used for numberplates, it needs to be done with a capital I instead of the serifed 1 - otherwise, it's about as close to perfect as I've ever seen - only the Q is slightly off, as can be seen here (just about), but it's not as if there are too many Q plates out there. The South Bank Centre has seen the potential of this font for headlining purposes - and has gone the whole hog, embedding it into their website. All I'll say is that it can be extracted, but I will not say how.
Autoshite has been an absolute goldmine for the purposes of writing this post - I might even register there and see if any of them know if there are versions of the fonts out there that I can't find, whether they have names or - like Lutz Headline - were unnamed and anonymously authored until the mid-1990s. Two users there are particularly worthy of massive hails - bram77, who's posted most of these photos as "recently spotted where I've been with my camera", and Trigger, who provided one picture but who also has a Flickr site full of old magazine road tests, mainly from the 1970s and 1980s - in which I can see how the Morris Marina was sharply criticised in 1975, when it was still on sale and only four years old, for the exact same vicious flaws that have seen Jeremy Clarkson and his cohorts have been dropping pianos on quite a few of them 30-odd years later.
The Font Now Known As Lutz Headline isn't a million miles away from the font used on road signs before Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert developed those we know today, and is superficially similar to Johnston, the ubiquitous London Underground font (which owes just as much to Gill Sans). The Kinneir-Calvert font that we are all familiar with, non-drivers included (because who's never seen a road sign?) is Transport, with those extra few tall characters in a subsidiary font, Motorway.
Being an avid collector of such fonts, I've gone looking for the foreign ones as well - a fair few of which are listed in those two Wikipedia pages, usually for road sign purposes, and which I don't need to go further into here; however, a few more worth mentioning are Numberplate France, which is one of several that are seen on French cars, even today; Numberplate Belgium, which is rather more representative of Belgian plates as a whole from when they were much narrower than all their neighbours; FE-Schrift as seen everywhere in Germany (and other countries now, such as Malta, South Africa and Uruguay) which took over from the old DIN 1451 font that is still used for road signs; Numberplate Italy, used since Italy transferred to full-size rear plates, and which is somewhat similar to one of the French fonts; Kenteken, the Dutch font used since time immemorial and which looks very similar to Gill Sans; Numberplate Switzerland, with the Swiss pathologically dedicated to neutrality by using a different font to everyone else just as they do on their roadsigns; and finally, Myriad, the latest font for Norwegian numberplates, replacing the SERCK-ish monstrosity that was current when I was in Norway, and which in turn superseded the use of Trafikkalfabetet, still seen on Norwegian road signs.
As a reward for getting through all this, I will treat you to a musical outro. Here's John Shuttleworth telling us what he really thinks of his Austin Ambassador.
Click to view
(Yes, that's the same man who gave us Jilted John, who was so upset he cried all the way to the chip shop.)
Aren't you all glad that's all over.