A Mystery Font That Took Over New York
> “There’s an unmistakable energy in all the designs that [Roger Excoffon] does,” said Tobias Frere-Jones, a Brooklyn-based typeface designer. “They project their personality so clearly. And it’s very obviously not Helvetica or not Times or any other generic thing that might be on the awning next door.” Excoffon’s most popular typeface is probably Mistral, which was modeled after his own handwriting.Both this passage and Exofon's fonts remind me of Henry van der Horst, a Dutch graphic designer who basically has a monopoly on Dutch market signs. His work has become so ubiquitous that a market stall without it feels less "authentic", so there is a lot of demand for his work.It's crazy: everyone here knows his handwriting, without knowing it was one man doing all of those signs for decades, and when I say "all those signs" I mean that at a national level (altough the Netherlands is small of course). He's like a weird kind of anonymous household name ("anonyfamous?"). Well, until a newspaper wrote an article about him down a few years ago, that is.[0] http://www.willemverweijen.nl/henry-van-de-horst/[1] https://www.volkskrant.nl/mensen/-op-de-markt-doet-niemand-a...