False Idol
A display face drawn from degraded 1970s rub-down lettering, pulling its character from pornographic magazines and home-made religious pamphlets in equal measure.
About
False Idol lifts its letterforms from the smudged, imperfect transfer lettering found in 1970s pornographic magazines and amateur religious leaflets, materials that shared the same aspirations to glamour and fell equally short. The result sits in an uncomfortable space between seedy and beautiful, a quality Barnbrook attribute to the naivety of the original sources. That awkward tension has made it one of the foundry's most enduring releases.
Classification
Derived from degraded rub-down lettering rather than formal type design tradition, giving it a raw, vernacular display character rooted in 1970s ephemera.