Westerns at The Movie Title Stills Collection
Any fan of lettering will enjoy The Movie Title Stills Collection, curated by designer Christian Annyas. Specifically relevant to the focus of wood type though is the page there featuring title screens from Western films.
The relationship between wood type styles and the modern interpretation of the “Wild West” is an interesting one, deserving of more elaboration than I’ll provide now. Suffice to say that the connection has provided a reliable device for designers attempting to evoke that particular chapter of North American history.
To be accurate, many of the examples from The Movie Title Stills Collection were hand-painted, but even among those it’s easy to see the influences of wood type with the use of styles like tuscan, latin, various slab serifs, etc, with allusions to typographic devices like catchwords, streamers, and generally intense letter decoration.
See more examples at The Movie Title Stills Collection.
2 comments on Westerns at The Movie Title Stills Collection.
2012/04/03, 6:44am #
Hey Nick, thanks for this great entry; I’m in the process of coming up with title screens for a project I’m working on right now…
Can you suggest any way(s) I can get any of these typefaces (especially the “3:10 to Yuma” & “Winchester” ones)?
2012/04/04, 12:17pm #
Hi Nick,
A lot of these images aren’t typefaces, but are in fact hand-lettering. Nonetheless, you could probably find something close with a search for “wood type” on MyFonts. More specifically, the Winchester example would be classified as a “tuscan”, and 3:10 to Yuma would be classified as an “antique tuscan”.
Hope that helps.