Sunset Gothic
DETAILS:
• A “painterly sans-serif” homage to the work of famous Los Angeles sign painters.
• Sunset Gothic is a family of seven fonts with weights ranging from Hairline to Heavy
From the Foundry:
“Sunset Gothic is a painterly sans-serif rendered in the tradition of Los Angeles sign-painters. It is an homage in part to John Baldessari (1931 – 2020) and his mostly-anonymous letterers (among them Norm Laich); to Ralph “Doc” Guthrie and the LATTC’s Sign Graphics programme (the last accredited degree of its kind in the US); and to the brush-rendered, vernacular approximations of vector-based letterforms which can be found up and down Sunset Boulevard, upon which Colophon Foundry’s L.A. outpost is located.
Sunset Gothic is a subjective mélange of a multitude of unattributed sans-serif painting styles. Available in seven weights—ranging from the wispily elegant Hairline to the wryly assertive Heavy—Sunset is typified by a modulated / flared vertical stroke that can be found across sign-painting outputs and in typeface precedents like Hermann Zapf’s Optima and Aldo Novarese’s Forma. Additional identifying features include curvature terminals that mimic brush-lift, and a handy stylistic set that provides angled sign-painters’ terminals to the type’s horizontal strokes.”
