Mistral is a casual script
typeface
A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
There are thousands o ...
designed by
Roger Excoffon
Roger Excoffon (7 September 1910 – 30 May 1983) was a French typeface designer and graphic designer.
Excoffon was born in Marseille, studied law at the University of Aix-en-Provence, and then moved to Paris to apprentice in a print shop. ...
for the
Fonderie Olive type foundry
A type foundry is a company that designs or distributes typefaces. Before digital typography, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces for hand typesetting, and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and M ...
, and released in 1953.
The
Amsterdam Type foundry released a version in 1955.
Excoffon based the form of the typeface on his own handwriting. The stroke has an informal graphic quality similar to brush and ink. The lowercase letters are carefully designed to connect on a line to an extent unusual in script fonts. Descenders are long, and increase the sense of motion. The face has several specially-designed ligatures (which have not been duplicated in digital versions). In lowercase Mistral is a true connecting script, similar to
cursive writing.
Choc, another typeface of Excoffon's, grew out of his repeated and ultimately abandoned efforts to make a
bold of Mistral.
The poster for the film ''
Drive'' uses this font for the film's title.
References
Bibliography
*Fiedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. ''Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History.'' Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. .
*Jaspert, W. Pincus, W. Turner Berry and A.F. Johnson. ''The Encyclopedia of Type Faces.'' Blandford Press Lts.: 1953, 1983. .
*Macmillan, Neil. ''An A–Z of Type Designers.'' Yale University Press: 2006. .
External links
Excoffon's Autograph(many images and examples)
Casual script typefaces
Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1953
Letterpress typefaces
Photocomposition typefaces
Digital typefaces
Display typefaces
Typefaces designed by Roger Excoffon
Fonderie Olive typefaces
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