Kenneth Anger's Rabbit's Moon font from 1972

[johnnymoods]

Found this font in an old experimental film by Kenneth Anger from 1972 and I just love it!

Does anyone know anything?

looking for a digital version. Commercial fonts are fine. 

Thanks in advance!

Johnny

[Greg Yerbury]

It is very likely to be lettering and not a font as such.

[johnnymoods]

oh ok thanks for your answer :)

what ways are there to create a font out of this? 

 

[Greg Yerbury]

I suspect fontographer maybe able to help you create a font that picks up the flavour of it. 

[Gecko]

I agree back in 1977 no digital fonts, so hand drawn. Closest I can see is start with a font like folkard, though folkard does have some of the characteristics its actually quite roughly drawn. Personally I would draw it from scratch in Adobe Illustrator, then create a font from those vectors.

https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/scriptorium/folkard/folkard/

Then as Greg Yerbury said create it as an outline font in fontographer.

[Riccardo Sartori]

11 minutes ago, Gecko said:

a font like folkard

“[Folkard] is based on the hand lettering of British (later Canadian) artist and calligrapher Charles Folkard.”

[johnnymoods]

Thanks so much guys!

Yes I'd love to have that font digitised. To me it's one the most beautiful I have ever seen. But I personally don't have the skills to draw it myself and create an alphabet with lower and upper case letters.

Any tips of who could? 

[Gecko]

Johnnymoods I draw and modify typefaces for various international companies. What exactly do you need?

Maybe just a basic typeface with full 26 character upper & lower case with numbers, commas, full stops and question marks. It gets fairly tedious when you start getting into lots of alternative glyphs and stuff.

[Greg Yerbury]

I suspect if that was a font an alt y might be needed. 

[Gecko]

A couple of alternatives are easy, it's when you start getting all sorts of alts and ligatures to suit each and every situation, there are just way too many possible combinations. I've got a couple of typefaces in my collection with over 1,200 alternative glyphs. Makes your head spin.

[Gecko]

Jonnymoods here is the progress so far on Rabbit Moon typeface. I need to sleep on it a few nights then do some more tweeks. How does it look to you?

[johnnymoods]

WOW! That's amazing! Looks beautiful. Does the rabbit come with the alphabet too? haha

Amazing work, thank you so much!

love

Jonathan

 

[Greg Yerbury]

It is very good.

[Greg Yerbury]

looking around the net I was able to find two other examples in the same lettering style 

[Gecko]

Greg I found "End" earlier and based some glyphs on it, the second one is new to me, it has a very different R, s, M and o.

The cap M is nice but the lowercase o looks a bit out of place IMHO.

If you find anymore characters let me know, I won't be committing it to a typeface for a short time. I like to sleep on it a few days.

[Riccardo Sartori]

3 hours ago, Gecko said:

the lowercase o looks a bit out of place

It’s consistent with the contrast of the top of |e|f|. But, in general this lettering doesn’t seem to be very consistent on where it collapse the two outlines and where it leaves a narrow gap.

3 hours ago, Gecko said:

If you find anymore characters let me know

The entire film is available on YouTube, and it seems those three are the only title cards.

 

[Gecko]

Okay are the final glyphs for Rabbit Moon with a couple of alternatives thrown in. I made it into a font in fontographer, some of the kerning is a bit off (that e is a bit of a stretch). So it is available in .otf or .ttf. Available for free to anyone interested. I'll attach the vectors if anyone wants to modify or improve on what they see here.

Rabbit Moon Finals.ai

[Gecko]

RabbitMoon-Open.ttfRabbitMoon-Open.ttfRabbitMoon-Open.otf

[Riccardo Sartori]

[johnnymoods]

Amazing! Can't believe that I posted to identify a font and by the end of this thread someone has actually designed that font! Huge respect and gratitude to Gecko for doing this!