Blue Oregon’s Kari Chisholm really ought to leave questions about design and copyright issues to the professionals, because his “a-ha” about the Gordon Smith campaign using the same typeface as the University of Oregon athletic department is mind-blowingly mis-informed.
Not only is it untrue that a typeface can be copyrighted, but the font the athletic department uses appears to be derived from Handel, a font that’s been around for a while. It substitutes modified lower-case versions of the characters for some of the upper-case characters, despite claims from Duck Sports News that it’s a closely-held super-secret font.
I spent many hours matching fonts in the early ’90s, in order to build electronic versions of traditionally-developed logos, but Nate Currie — one of the commenters at Blue Oregon — already did that. So let me focus on the actual build of the logo. Here’s the progression.
The original version of Gordon Smith’s logo:
A digital sample of ITC Handel Gothic Heavy from Fonts.com:
Three stages of the bitmapped characters:
- Direct screen capture from the Fonts.com page.
- Moving the “m” so that the crossbar matches the height of the capitals and extending the stems.
- Widening the space in the “m”, and replacing the “N” with a modified “m”.
Each of the names anamorphically stretched to fit over the logo.
Not an exact fit, because I didn’t want to take more than a few minutes to do it — I’m not about to spend any time defending Gordon Smith — but this is truly a non-story.
Hopefully, Jeff Merkley’s web guy has some better material to work with than this.