Looming over the baseline like long shadows on a rainy night, the characters in Mark Simonson’s Lakeside are an homage to brush-script titles of 1940s film noir. Simonson has spent many hours screening the typefaces of period films and evaluating them accordingly—critiques that have informed the authenticity of his many nostalgia fonts. (L.A. Confidential, for example, scores only two stars for its frequent type anachronisms.) In Lakeside, Simonson smoothly fuses swooping capital counters with clean angled ascenders, panning a typographic lens over hardboiled smoke curling through the sharp light of Venetian blinds. As in most contemporary digital versions of brush-stroke nostalgia typefaces, Lakeside uses OpenType flexibility to make its script feel authentically hand lettered. Each character assesses its neighbor and adjusts accordingly for optimal aesthetic effect, allowing the crossbar of the lower case t, for instance, to nudge right, left, or extend—adjacent x-heights permitting.
ANNA MALSBERGER