I happened quite randomly happened upon this youtube video about a 90's Canadian tv show Forever Knight. Normally I wouldn't have given it much mind and clicked on to another video but 12 seconds in, the word "Knight" comes on screen, in the unmistakeble Sign Of The Times font. Having scanned all letters and a lot of other characters to create the SOTT truetype font that I still see around on Prince fan sites, I might be more sensitive to it than others.

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Either way, this was in the '90s, before I made the font file that the TV wouldn't have used anyway. Does anyone know the artist that created the typography for Sign Of The Times and did that person kinda re-use the typography for this TV show? Was it a tribute?

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What's more, is that allowed? I'll have to re-lookup any interviews with Laura LiPuma who created the artwork for the album and, iirc, was the one who chose the fontographer.

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Did anyone ever notice the similar lettering before?

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Small update: in this podcast Laura mentions the name, Glen Parsons (not sure about spelling). I can't find much about him and he isn't mentioned on the imdb page of forever knight, nor is Laura LiPuma.

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more updates: So I guess his name is Glenn Parsons, unless there's another Gl...ypography.

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More info, he also created the logos for Madhouse and Apollonia 6 and a whole lot more.

[Edited 8/5/24 10:39am]

I suggest you go get glasses, because when I watched the video, I immediately rejected your nonsense because there is no resemblance between that font and the SOTT design (which isn't a font).

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JFC dude, go compare the G and the T to the SOTT single cover. They are nothing alike. I didn't even bother with the rest of the letters.

bizzie said:

I suggest you go get glasses, because when I watched the video, I immediately rejected your nonsense because there is no resemblance between that font and the SOTT design (which isn't a font).

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JFC dude, go compare the G and the T to the SOTT single cover. They are nothing alike. I didn't even bother with the rest of the letters.

Foreeever Knight,

bizzie longs to be

Foreeevvver Knight.

In that context, does "JFC" mean "Jesus Fucking Christ" or "Just For Clarification"? Just wondering.

(Just kidding. I'm not wondering at all.)

this is how bad we need new music ... were fighting over fonts now ? smh

Jersey Fried Chicken

nayroo2002 said:

Jersey Fried Chicken

bizzie said:

I suggest you go get glasses, because when I watched the video, I immediately rejected your nonsense because there is no resemblance between that font and the SOTT design (which isn't a font).

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Hi bizzie, thanks for responding. I don't know about you, but I live in a world where the estate of Marvin Gaye can get money for music that to my ears is possibly maybe influenced by his music, but doesn't sound similar on the grounds that they supposedly copied Gaye's song.

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Now, I agree with you that the lettering isn't 1 on 1 the exact same. And I also know that Sign Of The Times doesn't use a font, but had Glen Parsons write all the texts in that style.

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My point is that the lettering is strikingly similar. If you can't see it, than we look at the world extremely differently. To help you, here's a comparison, the text from the series on the left, the word in the sign of the times font (made from scans from the album and quite amateurish at that, I had no idea about kerning and so many other things needed to make a quality font)

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Wouldn't you agree that they are so similar that, if not done by the same artist, then the artist that made them for the TV show was very much inspired by the sign of times typography? Are there more examples of the style of letters being this similar?

[Edited 8/14/24 9:19am]

[Edited 8/14/24 9:20am]

i, for one, absolutely applaud your amazing effort here, MEDIUMDRY.

Please continue coming back here, no matter what the others say.

mediumdry said:

Now, I agree with you that the lettering isn't 1 on 1 the exact same.

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JFC. Do you read what you write? You just admit that your entire thesis is BULLSHIT.

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Also, do you have any idea how many fonts look almost identical? (And again: these two have numerous differences, they are not almost identical.) How many lawsuits do you know about designers stealing font designs? I'm sure there are some, and I bet those involve fonts which are extremely close and not "sharing a concept" as in "letters but with rough edges".

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I kind of see a similarity here, but as Bert said, there are hundreds of thousands of "fonts" (I'm using the word loosely here) and many of them are way more similar than that.

A few things … random observations on this fun topic from a type-curious person …

Firstly, I do see the similarity here. This is all hand lettering (and far from 'hand writing'), so there is a lot of room for variation within the set of letters. The original designer clearly enjoys that variation, and whoever made the Canadian TV lettering seems to pick up from that starting point. Many of these letters could pass for being in the same line of text if interchanged between the two sources. It would be unsurprising if the letterer for the TV show was not influenced by the SOTT lettering. I'd say the similarities are partially about underlying letterforms but also about:

• Scratchy rendering style (use of similar tool). Thw way in which the shapes are 'eaten into' seems similar, though the SOTT design seems to have more breaks in the strokes
• Shifting baselines and glyph sizes
• Approach to overlapping letters

Those things combine to make it extremely similar, in my view.

I found this nice article (that pre-dates the podcast linked in this thread, but covers similar ground and doesn;t take 3 hours to absorb) from the current: https://www.thecurrent.or...le-rain-to

The article mentions that '[Laura LiPuma] Nash hired typographers to design fonts and physically collage in certain symbols or numbers in exchange for letters and in accordance with Prince's meticulous direction.' That wording is from the interviewer, so we don;t knwo that she used the word 'fonts' and porbably didn't, as she seems to know her stuff. 'Typographers' is also not strictly correct, but many typographers are also rather good at hand lettering so it's possible, and GLenn Parsons is evidently a typographer and type designer.

This is Glenn Parson's business website: https://www.astroluxdesig...ge_id=1122, and here he is on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/...s-bb88ab6/

Nothing else in his portoflio seems that much like the SOTT work, but it's pretty diverse so I guess he can turn his hand to whatever the brief requires.

Anyway, fun topic

I was thinking "good god this innocent thread has devolved into disgusting hostility" only to realize it's still just that one guy LOL

keep on keeping on

I contacted Glenn over linkedin and asked him about this project. Sounds like he has stories to share and will do so at some point on LinkedIn.

Interested to hear his take on how it came about. The lettering is a huge component of the SOTT era.

[Edited 8/15/24 14:59pm]