Font fans- Can someone identify the font on this webpage

Thanks for all the advice/tips/suggestions! I’ll start checking with the font-identifier websites for future font questions.

Another ballparker
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/hanoded/business-as-usual/bold-italic/

The font sizing and spacing in “McFarlands” is so irregular that I’m inclined to believe its hand-drawn. Some letters are squashed together, some are far apart. The whole thing looks amateurish. It’s possible they are copying a hand-drawn or commercial artist’s logo from years ago… If a client comes to you with an established graphic logo, you pretty much have to try and run with it.

Look at the logos for products carried, and it almost looks like the logo design was trying on some level to mimic the Dick in Dick Cepek (he said with a straight face).

http://mcfarlandoffroad.com/offroad.html
On this page, the blue graphic, the “brush” font is obviously a computer font, based on the regularity of the letter shapes.

You need to read the replies. We HAVE been talking about exactly what the OP asked about - the “handwritten” McFarland’s on the top of the website.

That is almost certainly a representation of the store’s monument sign, thus the comments about sign designers and how they would go about creating such a monstrosity.

If the block at the top of the web page was done by the web designer, they must have gotten their start in sign misdesign. :slight_smile:

(As a friend of mine used to put it, “a graduate of the Western Truck Driving School of Computer Repair” … or “Web Design.”)

Identifont in particular is very good, especially if you have a complete font set to work from. It asks a zillion questions about the details of many letters to zoom in on possibilities, and the more you can answer, the better the result. I’ve found matches from five or six letter examples, though.

As to the “why” of your question… you do know that absolutely nothing on that site is worth emulating, unless you’re going to parody them. It’s all grade-Z craptastic - and I say “all” because there’s not even a slight attempt to make things like the trade name consistent. (Did you notice, f’rex, that the front signage is “MCFARLAND” while everything else is “McFarland’s”?)

Did anyone else notice that the navigation buttons at the top of the page are Flash? Just buttons you could have used a GIF for, they don’t do anything except look like static nav buttons, but they are Flash. And a separate Flash for each button, too.

OP, why do you want to know?

The closest I can come is Staccato 222. Here’s a sample.

It has been distorted by rotation, stretching, and some individual letter rearranging to make the word less regular (the L and A are up from the baseline).

For ordinary text, I agree. But for artistic expression like signs, distortion provides variety and brand identification. The sky’s the limit for art.

Too late for edit. Staccato is also called Mistral.

And the dumpster is bottomless.

I won’t say there is never a time to distort type, but it’s 99% less than it’s done. Maybe 99.99%, and the only valid distortion is of entire word forms, in, f’rex, an arch or bend.
Far too many people stretch and squish type as a basic part of what they call “design,” and distorting letterforms is somewhere below scribbling a mustache and nipples on a Mona Lisa.

Signmakers in particular can’t seem to lay out a sign without distorting every text string on the board. Special place in hell, etc.

I agree with you. Unless you know exactly WTF you’re doing, don’t touch a font in that way. That website is a collection of some of the worst graphic design I’ve seen. It doesn’t look much like Staccato/Mistral to me, either, other than the fact that they are both cursive-type scripts.

I agree with you. Unless you know exactly WTF you’re doing, don’t touch a font in that way. (One good example are the letterforms in the FedEx logo, which are based on both Futura Bold and Univers 67 Bold Condensed) That website is a collection of some of the worst graphic design I’ve seen. It doesn’t look much like Staccato/Mistral to me, either, other than the fact that they are both cursive-type scripts.

If you look at the lower part of this page, the font used for all-caps looks a lot like the one in question. This makes me doubt that the logo is created from scratch, but more likely an altered stock font.

Which looks closer to Mistral than Geronimo or Business as Usual to me.

And note that the “DOES IT ALL” below, in the same font, is condensed, probably with an art program, not by the font designer. This means to me that the page designer has no qualms about significant distortion.

I really am not seeing how they are similar. You’re right that the top and bottom font are the same. But this font doesn’t look anything like the font in “McFarland’s” to me. The amount of distortion that would need to be used to get a regular (though amateurish) font to look like “McFarland’s” would require a lot of work and I believe would be beyond the ken of the graphic designer you designed the page.

I have emailed the graphic design company and asked what the font is. So far, I have an automated response, but it’s Sunday.

You have to squint a lot. :slight_smile:

I really don’t want to spend the time doing this, as it can be time-consuming to get it just right and so far, no one has offered to pay me, but here are the steps I would take, starting with the best choice font first:

[ol][li]Rotate the text CCW about 30 degrees.[]Condense it a little horizontally.[]Skew the top to the right.[]Move a few letters off the baseline, up, the middle “a” the most, then the “l”.[]Rotate individual letters just a little, like the final “s” and some of the inner letters to make them connect better.[]Stretch the “M” to make it taller. []Adjust all lines as needed so letters are connected as desired.[/ol]Now that I read what I wrote, I might use a different sequence and save the 30 degree rotation for last.[/li]
A little tricky, but not all that complicated for a moderately experienced graphic designer, and not all that different from what I first learned to do 30 years ago. Maybe not Graphics 101, but at least 102.

As for the font ID, look at the capital F - the crossing center bar is not found in several of the suggested alternatives. Geronimo was the only one that had that feature and similar lower-case forms. That’s neither common in handwriting (even artiste-ic handwriting) and I’d wager it is not modified from the original font spec. (It would require a degree of over-drawing or adding extra drag points… too much work.)

As for duplicating it, you have to consider the tools. Anyone who’s used a wide variety of graphic tools knows there are operations that are simple in one and somewhere between difficult and impossible in another. There was a time when I could tell which app (sorry, “desktop publishing program”) had been used to create a page by the details and fillips the designer had used.

This was likely created by a much lower-end tool than Adobe, and probably a sign-making app that has all of the drag, squish, warp and smush tools in the top layer. So it probably took the “designer” all of five minutes where it would take one of us with illustrator an hour to replicate.

I could maybe see it if it’s a distorted hodgepodge of several brush-script fonts. It just a) looks to me like handlettering and b) still seems to me like a lot of work for a moderately experienced graphic designer to do to make something that looks as amateur as that.

Which is why I use the Corel family for this kind of graphic. All of those tools are available and relatively easy to use in Corel Draw.

Although I don’t believe the formal terms are “squish” and “smush.”

CD is universal in the sign world, because it’s cheap (especially when, as it so often seems, it’s either an ancient version or pirated - the sign machine makers seem to love bundling about v3.0 with their systems).

Fine. Compress/Extend Type Horizontally and Compress/Extend Type Vertically. Right next to the Make Selection Randomly Ugly button.