Cooper Black

Category	Old style serif
Designer(s)	Oswald Bruce Cooper
Foundry	Barnhart Brothers & Spindler
Re-issuing foundries	American Type Founders, Wordshape

Cooper Black is a heavily weighted, old style serif typeface designed by Oswald Bruce Cooper in 1921 and released by the Barnhart Brothers & Spindler type foundry in 1922. The typeface is drawn as an extra bold weight of Cooper Old Style. Though not based on a single historic model, Cooper Black exhibits influences of Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and the Machine Age. Cooper Black was a predominant lettering style popularized by Oswald Bruce Cooper in Chicago and the Midwest of America in the 1920s, given typographic form. An earlier weight of Cooper's type designs, Cooper Old Style (later just "Cooper") was released first, though Cooper Black was what BB&S foundry was after. Cooper Black was advertised as being "for far-sighted printers with near-sighted customers", as well as "the Black Menace" by detractors.

Cooper Hilite

Cooper Hilite is a version of Cooper Black originally designed by painting white relief impressions onto a printed proof of Cooper Black. A messy version was released by the Russian type foundry Paratype in 1993. A detailed version that is a direct digital rendering of 'Oz' Cooper's original was released by the Wordshape type foundry in 2010. The Wordshape version is accompanied by a copy of Cooper Black that can be used to fill the incised spaces of Cooper Hilite with color via layering.

Cooper Black Italic

Cooper Black Italic is an italic variant, with swash characters as alternate characters.

A digitized version with swashes was first released by Wordshape as Cooper Black Italic Swash, designed by Ian Lynam Design. Wordshape's version includes alternate swash designs. Wordshape also released a non-swash version in 2010 that rivals previous versions by Adobe, Berthold, and others, though it is based on Cooper's original drawings in lieu of digitized versions of printed versions of Cooper Black Italic, as were previous versions.

Cooper Black Condensed

Cooper Black Condensed is a condensed variant, described by Cooper as 'condensed but not squeezed'. The condensed font is 20% lighter than the regular Cooper Black. Versions are available through many type companies such as Adobe and Wordshape.

Variants

Goudy Heavyface, Ludlow Black and Pabst Extra Bold were designed in response to Cooper Black.[1]

Soap, designed by Ray Larabie of Typodermic, is a uni-case variant based on Cooper Black.[2]

Bitstream Cooper, designed at Bitstream in 1986, added interpolated light, medium, and bold styles, with the corresponding italics, to the existing black and old style weights. They vary from the originals in that they suppose intermediate weights would not have the same depth of character as the original weights of the typefaces. [3]

See also

• Samples of display typefaces

Notable uses

• FK Željezničar Sarajevo crest.
• Once Upon a Time in the West during opening credits.
• Brain Bangley Edition of Asher Roth and Dj Wreckineyez Radical Magical Podcast
• The cover of Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys album
• The cover of LA Woman by The Doors
• The cover of On the Corner by Miles Davis
• The cover of the David Bowie album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
• The cover of Brothers by The Black Keys
• The cover of The Green Book by Muammar al-Gaddafi
• The logo for indie band Dodgy
• The standard font for all OFWGKTA advertisements and logo.
• In It For The Money by indie band Supergrass
• The most often used logo for indie/power-pop band Superdrag
• Herman Miller Picnic Posters, 1970 to 1989, designed by Steve Frykholm
• The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, used on roadswitchers and other mainline locomotives in their basic diesel-era freight scheme.
• EasyJet, the low cost airline.
• Oxfam GB uses this for their Be Humankind branding
• The Odd Couple
• The Garfield comic strip uses this for their books and other branding.
• Tootsie Roll
• Diff'rent Strokes
• Top Ramen
• Cheers (first, final scene, and closing credits)
• Payless ShoeSource (until 2006)
• Brothers (first and final scene production credits)
• M*A*S*H (with lines added to give a stencil effect)
• Dad's Army
• Enos
• The typeface used for closing lower third credits of music videos aired on CMT from 1984 to 1986.
• Freak Out!, the 1966 debut album by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.
• Nilsson Schmilsson
• The 1976 poster artwork of King Kong
• Slurm logos in Futurama
• National Lampoon
• "Misapplication" outside a 19th C. Gothic church noted. [4]
• Logo on Attack Attack!'s album Someday Came Suddenly
• Department store chain Zayre
• Supermarket Chain, Weis Markets.
• The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh opening credits.
• Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery opening credits.
• The "Vote For Pedro" shirt from Napoleon Dynamite.
• The Two Ronnies
• Louie
• The Leisure Recordings logo
• Oxfam Great Britain's Be Humankind campaigning style (2008–2011) [5]
• The 1970s version of the Aperture Science logo in Portal 2.
• The titles cards for the second and third seasons of the Spider-Man 1967 TV series.
• The old logo to Cooper Tires
• The logo for the band The Fratellis

References

• Allan Haley. Typographic Milestones. John Wiley and Sons: September 1992. ISBN 978-0-471-28894-7.
• Blackwell, Lewis. 20th Century Type. Yale University Press: 2004. ISBN 0-300-10073-6.
• Fiedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History. Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. ISBN 1-57912-023-7.
• Jaspert, W. Pincus, W. Turner Berry and A.F. Johnson. The Encyclopedia of Type Faces. Blandford Press Lts.: 1953, 1983. ISBN 0-7137-1347-X.
• Macmillan, Neil. An A–Z of Type Designers. Yale University Press: 2006. ISBN 0-300-11151-7.

External links

• Short overview
• Cooper Black font information (Microsoft typography)
• Type Gallery - Cooper Black
• Behind the Typeface: Cooper Black (satirical, but very informative video about Cooper Black by Cheshire Dave)
• Ian Lynam Design: Cooper Black Swash Italic
• Wordshape: Cooper Black Swash Italic
• Typophile: Cooper Black Italic swash alternates?
• Book of American Types: Cooper Hilite
• Cooper Black as a webfont on Fontdeck