Skylab

Skylab, along with Straker, Telstar and Xenotype, explores the sci-fi aesthetic of headline and dry-transfer fonts originally released in the early 1970s. Built from a rounded rectangle pierced with offcentre holes, the left-right weight switch derives from early optical recognition faces and the commercial types that were inspired by them: Bob Newman’s 1970 Data 70 and Colin Brignall’s 1965 Countdown for Letraset, for example. Magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) is a technology used mainly by the banking industry. The mid- 50s MICR E-13B font (below), from which this aesthetic originally derives, contains no letters; just numbers and a small number of other characters. The cameo Code version further explores the machinereadable idea by placing a (non-functional) binary code along the base of each character. Upper and lower case glyphs provide alternate unicase forms that can mixed as desired.