Alfred Hitchcock Geek: Now 20% Geekier

Woo! I finally added a proper masthead to this blog and it looks pretty cool, if I do say so, m'self.

I created the text portion using a very sweet font created for this Saul Bass fan site. (As you may know, Bass designed the titles and posters for many Hitchcock films, including North by Northwest, and Vertigo, as well as other films, such as Anatomy of a Murder.) This font is an homage to his style; the designer, Matt Terich, has generously made it available as a free download, which you can get over at Typographica.com.

Says that blog:

The font is not a faithful digitization of any particular title sequence or poster — in fact, type designer Nick Shinn notes that Bass didn’t do the actual lettering and veteran Robert Trogman adds that Dave Nagata did most of the drawings — but it does give a general sense of Bass’ rough, hand-cut style.

For the record, Bass used such designers as Art Goodman and Dave Nagata to execute the lettering on many of his posters.

As regards the logo, I found a free (knock on wood) version of the famous Hitchcock profile sketch and added the glasses using Gimp, an open-source knock-off of Photoshop.

I work with many ridiculously talented designers, and I am careful not to refer to myself as one of them. Still, I'm rather proud of how this little project came out. FTW!