Retro Typography at Dulles International Airport
I flew into Washington-Dulles on a recruiting trip a couple weeks ago, and I loved seeing this fantastic retro typography in the baggage claim area. I have no idea if any of it’s original to the building, but you can just imagine walking around and seeing signage like this in the early 1960s.
Even better, they’ve chosen to use this same typeface for all the shops, restaurants, and airlines hosted in the area. The pictures I should have taken were of “Starbucks” and “Virgin America” in the same script. Very cool.
Not wanting to leave a tender, albeit nerdy, moment alone, I decided to do a little reconnaissance work. Would you believe there are tools that let you identify fonts based on a photo? But, of course! My favorite is WhatTheFont, and here’s what it came up with:
I found Stereo Gothic to be the closest, but not a perfect match. So then I headed over to WhatFontis, a similar font search site, and it got me a little closer:
Okay, so now we’re dancing. It turns out that Bunken Tech Sans Wide is darn close to an exact match. (The lower right corner of the “G” is a right angle in the original, so that doesn’t line up, but everything else looks solid. Custom variant created for the airport?) Ironically, you can find Bunken Tech Sans on WhatTheFont’s parent website, MyFonts, but it didn’t come up in my original search.
So, typeface analysis is a totally normal hobby, right?
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Update: A reader (thanks, Johannes!) has identified the typeface as Eero, drawn by Christian Schwartz for a restoration at Dulles in 2003. He worked from the original blueprints by architect Eero Saarinen. In Schwartz’s words:
If I did my job well, you won’t be able to tell which signs are old and which are new.
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