The London 2012 Font

Whenever I see a typeface that looks interesting, two questions usually pop into my head.
1. "What font is that?"
2. "How can I get it?"
I've become a bit of a font enthusiast. I have my list of favorites (Standard Medium), my least favorites (Comic Sans), and fonts that are so overused, I wish people would use them less (Arial and Times New Roman).

Recently, I've been watching the Olympic Games, and pretty much wherever there's a playing field, the text, "London 2012" appears, written in an interesting font. As it always does when I see an interest font, that first question popped into my mind. "What is that font?" I turned to my two trusty tools for font identification. Of course, they require a font sample, so I went to the London 2012 web site and grabbed a PNG file containing strings of text in that font. The What the Font! tool from MyFonts didn't come up with any close matches. I decided to use the Identifont tool, which tries to identify fonts based on your answers to questions about the font's appearance. No dice there.

I was stumped. I noticed that the font was being used practically everywhere associated with the Games, including mobile apps.

I eventually found myself in the iOS App Store, looking at the official game of the 2012 Olympic Games, and yes, it uses the font extensively. I know that some iOS apps include font files in TrueType format that you can grab by diving into the app bundle. A 3D game wasn't a likely candidate, since they typically use bitmaps to generate blocks of text. I did, however, notice in the "other apps by this developer" section, there was a featured app with an icon containing a sample of the font. It's an app that shows results for the Games. Looking at the app preview images, I could tell that it used TableViews for presenting its data, and the best part (for the purpose of my "wild font chase"), the font I was looking for is being used in the title bar. It was free, so I got it, and immediately dove in. I copied the app's .ipa file to the desktop, renamed it to a .zip file, extracted the ZIP archive and browsed its contents. The Payload folder. The .app folder. And there it was. Among all the .nib, .png, and .plist files, was a file called 2012_Headline.ttf. Bingo! Copied it to my desktop then installed it.



Here's what the font looks like displaying the date and temperature in degrees fahrenheit. The font being used for the time is Independent Sans, which was used on subway car number plates. (The designer of the font seems to have removed it from his web site. Shame.) The app generating this display is GeekTool, available on the Mac App Store.

The 2012 Headline font is a nice one. It's edgy. It flies counter to traditional typographic conventions. It calls attention to the message without being too annoying. I wouldn't use it as an everyday body text font, but that's not its purpose.

It's sure to not be another Comic Sans because it doesn't have as wide a user base. However, some critics claim that the font is so "ugly" it makes Comic Sans look good. One critic says:

2012 Headline belongs in a place where Comic Sans and the [menus] for every Greek restaurant in America do unspeakable things to one another, not headlining the Olympic games.

As you may have guessed by now, I take the opposite end of the argument. However, I must say that given the right context, a much bemoaned font may be more appropriate than another. The problem is that few people bother selecting the right font for a given context.

To prove that, I will do what was done in a documentary on Comic Sans. Take everyday text and change its font to 2012 Headline. I'll then let you be the judge.

Two web sites I use on a daily basis are Facebook and Google. What would their logos look like in the 2012 Headline font?




How about scenes from life in the city?
A sign in the subway, perhaps?


Or street signs?


Or how about the logo of a local baseball team? Not my favorite team, of course, but one that could use the facelift.