Another beauty of the drawings for the projected Irvine New Town shown in my previous posts (that actually date from 1971) is the way the project envisaged the widespread use of my very favourite typeface, Microgramma.
To my mind, it is the typeface of the 1960s and 70s:
Designed by Aldo Novarese and Alessandro Butti for the Turin Nebiolo Type Foundry in 1952, it became the typeface for technical illustrations, manuals and, it seems, for estate signage in the depiction of a cool but conspicuously uniform way of life, complete with well-tailored beautiful young things kicking around walkways.
As anyone of my generation with similar inclinations to mine will know, Microgramma also became the typeface of choice for a TV21-fuelled future because it was widely used by Gerry Anderson in the titles of Captain Scarlet, Joe 90 and, best of all, UFO:
The Sheffield group, The Human League also knew of Microgramma's potential in all these respects when they used it as their signature typeface for all their pre-Dare recordings:
And from a world where yet another golden hour of an imagined future is constructed with Microgramma, the beautiful, excited but not quite-yet ironic integration of banks of oscillators, modulators and patch circuits, and the Park Hill flats.
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