Thursday I attended a Salt Lake City AIGA event with Michael Mabry. He spoke of a period where all his work incorpoated great gobs of hand-lettering. Some of it reminded me of the titles and logo for the Talking Heads/Jonathan Demme film Stop Making Sense, which, in turn, reminded me of the titles for Dr. Strangelove, which then reminded me of the event graphics at the 1999 AIGA conference in Las Vegas.

Today, through the wonder of the world wide web, I discovered that one man is responsible for this stuff: Pablo Ferro. His site [sadly, now defunct — 01/09] is a bit disjointed but provides a few good looks at his stuff from the last 50 years. While he is widely known for those fitted boxes of elongated, hand-drawn letters, his work is varied. Do rent Bullitt, if only for the title sequence. It’s worth it.

Not surprisingly, the omnipresent Steven Heller has written something about Ferro (without paragraphs, unfortunately). And Yuji Adachi of P-Font made a font inspired by Ferro’s lettering (see Major Kong).

Update (Sept. 12, 2007): Paul Wilde L'Heureux has released the free font Pablo Skinny, which is, well, exactly what the name implies.

See also: Mabry Blocks : It Came From The Big Screen!