Diecast
Diecast
Typography is the design and arrangement of the simple graphic glyphs that embody language. A typeface conveys tone and emotion, often before a single word is read. Each character is shaped by centuries of use, misuse, and reinvention; these glyphs aren’t static, they mutate to reflect shifts in culture and technology. Type carries the fossil imprints of its evolution: the serifs of the Roman chisel, the flourish of pen on parchment, and more recently, the mechanical construction of pixels and Bézier curves. The anatomy of a typeface – its ascenders, bowls, terminals, x-height – operates as a kind of dialect; a grotesque sans and a humanist serif speak with very different inflections. Typography is rarely neutral – it encodes values like reliability, luxury, rebellion, sincerity, intimacy. True geometry rarely reads well to the human eye. Letters must often be subtly distorted to look correct. Circular letters like “O” overshoot the baseline and cap height to appear optically aligned; vertical and horizontal strokes differ in thickness to appear equal. These imperceptible adjustments are foundational to good type design.
Diecast
Diecast Character Set
About
Diecast is scanned directly from photographs of street-name signs from London’s suburban sprawl, faithfully preserving the original rough and uneven finish. Cast in iron and painted black on a white ground, the raised letters were set within a border that also included the postcode at the right-hand end. This was often cut off during the Second World War to confuse any invading Germans, though a few rare examples do survive intact. This font is the intermediate design between the chunky Victorian style of Mulgrave and the Ministry of Transport sans, digitised as Ministry. Although they date from between 1910 and 1933, these signs show the beginnings of several features Ministry later incorporated, notably the thinner strokes and the more modern forms of the G, M, R and S. The letter widths are approaching a monospace - the L, F and E are relatively wide compared to the W and M, a feature that may have something to do with the casting process. These idiosyncracies were all ironed out when the first version of the MOT alphabet was produced.