Lakeside
Designed by Mark Simonson, 2008.
Looming over the baseline like long shadows on a rainy night, the characters in Mark Simonson's Lakeside are a cinematic homage to the brush script titles of 1940s film noir. Simonson has spent many hours screening the typefaces of period films, and evaluating them accordingly (L.A. Confidental, for example, scores only two stars for its frequent type anachronisms), a critique that has informed the authenticity of his many nostalgia fonts. In Lakeside, Simonson smoothly fused swooping capital counters with clean angled ascenders, panning a typographic lens over smoke curling through the sharp light of Venetian blinds, or dames lounging poolside. As is the trend with contemporary digitizations of brush stroke nostalgia typefaces, Lakeside uses OpenType flexibility to make its script feel authentically hand lettered. Each character assesses its neighbors and adjusts accordingly for optimal aesthetic effect, allowing the lower case t's crossbar to nudge right, left, or extend — adjacent x heights permitting.
Published in Print magazine's column Hot Type.
