Susan was a project aiming to recreate the grotesque typeface used in the end credits of the first Doctor Who serials from the BBC. I’m unlikely to keep going with this project now.
Susan is the name of the Doctor’s granddaughter, the first character to travel with him through space and time.
The BBC designers seems to have used a grotesque typeface from Stephenson Blake, or a variant thereof. The foundry Stephenson Blake, which closed in the 1990s, had in their 19th century catalogue grotesque designs similar to the one used onscreen. Today equivalents include:
- Bureau Grot (formerly Grotesque) by Font Bureau (1989)
- Grotesque No 9 by URW++ (2000)
- Grotesque 6 by Émilie Rigaud (2010)
- Brezel by MilieuGrotesque (2011)
- Susan — the one you’re currently looking at :)
The repository archives a very early state of the font from the summer of 2015. The 26 latin letters has been traced from the title cards. Uppercase and lowercase. If anything, it’s a pre-drawing, clumsy at best, with great room to improve upon. No diacritics, punctuation, figures, other alphabet, kerning, or anything else. Hosted here are an initial source file for Fontforge and a raw OpenType export.
The files are licensed under SIL OFL.
- See also : FONTLOG.md
Preview of the font’s current state ↓
Part of the drawing reference ↓
