New Font: Canadian Military Aircraft, 1920s
This article is part of a series:
In my prior post about my Esci S.E.5a, I mentioned that I had to design a new font for the registration lettering. I previously designed a number of aircraft lettering fonts about 20 years ago, designed for World War II and postwar RAF and RCAF aircraft. The Aviaeology book “Early Canadian Military Aircraft” contained enough information to create a TrueType font of the lettering applied to Canadian military aircraft in the first few years of the Canadian air force at Camp Borden. The photo above shows an Avro 504K restored with a representation of this font. Both my old and new fonts can be accessed from http://www.aircraft-in-focus.com/fonts/.
You may notice that the Canadian air force font is related to a lettering style commonly used in several European countries in the 1920s and 1930s. The photos below show a few examples from different countries. There are differences, and I’m currently altering my Camp Borden font to account for those. In a few weeks I’ll be releasing a beta of a new font that should have wider applicability to interwar civil aircraft of various nations. Please feel free to download, use, and send me feedback.
3 additional images. Click to enlarge.
George Henderson said on December 25, 2018
Many thanks August. I’m a font freak and one can’t have too many fonts. I am currently doing a B6N2 in with captured U.S. markings. I need to make my own aircraft “S 19” markings and the fonts I have a close but not quite.
August Horvath said on December 26, 2018
That is a tough one. I can’t find a good hi-res picture of S-19’s tail, but from what I can see, it’s not a standard font at all. They may have used one-off stencils for those captured birds. I’d probably just reproduce that marking in Photoshop as best I could.
Jeff Bailey said on December 25, 2018
Thanks very much, August. That’s an interesting subject that doesn’t get mentioned often.
Jeff Bailey said on December 25, 2018
I wish you had more photos of real aircraft, with or without your fonts.
August Horvath said on December 25, 2018
There are about 30,000 on my web site, and I will keep posting them here when relevant if folks are interested.
Julio Contreras Martínez said on December 25, 2018
Un trabajo muy interesante para los que modelamos aviones de la WW1.