The typeface I've chosen to study is Motor Oil 1937 M54
Motor Oil is a TrueType font file. TrueType font files are the most common font formats in todays world on Macs and Windows computers, offering a high degree of control when it comes to font sizing and pixels.
Looking at this font it doesn't seem like a complete font, in terms of complete glyphs, small caps, varying weights, such as italic, light, bold, ultrabold etc. It's designed by some kind of web presence called 'justme54s', although it's a font design I personally like due to it's references of Swiss and Bauhaus graphic design, I wouldn't say it's a complete font on par with fonts such as the Helvetica family, but I can still carry out an investigation into the letterforms I do have to work with.
Waterfall
Character map, you can see here the absence of many supporting letterforms and glyphs. All that's included is letterforms and lining figures.
Here I'm comparing Motor Oil against other prominent sans-serif fonts to compare and contrast them against each other. I'm looking at Motor Oil, Futura Medium, Helvetica Regular and Century Gothic Regular.
Helvetica has an old style 'a', with a terminal, usually seen on serif fonts such as Baskerville and Garamond whereas the others dont.
Helvetica and Century Gothic both have x-heights noticably higher/closer in relation to the cap-height when compared to Motor Oil and Futura.
Motor Oil and Futura are strikingly similar, both have some capital letters such as N and M with apexes that actually align with the ascender height instead of cap-height. Creating a cool, sharp and striking effect.
Helvetica also, if I judged it correctly, has a slightly slanted axis on the o, whereas the other sans-serif are transitional fonts with a straight axis.
Here, I added a 3pt stroke to the Century Gothic font to create a sort of faux-bold typeface and it's very similar. It's clear Motor Oil designed in the late 2000's highly references Futura, designed in 1927 by Paul Renner.
The main difference is Futura has more distance between the baseline and descender, whereas Motor Oil has a slightly more condensed space.
A major difference is the M's. Futura has slanted stems whereas Motor Oil has perfectly vertical stems.
Differences between Helvetica and Motor Oil
One of the big differences between Helvetica and Motor Oil are the 'a' and the 'M'. Helvetica has an old style a with a terminal whereas Motor Oil has a more modern style a, more common with sans-serif fonts.
Motor Oil has vertical stems and sharp apexes on the capital M whereas Helvetica has flat apexes with vertical stems. Motor Oil's use of vertical stems with sharp apexes is probably pretty unique to Motor Oil when comparing to even Futura which has slanted stems. Motor Oil also has a sharp crotch on the M, Helvetica again has a flat crotch.
The o in Helvetica also has a slight axis, whereas Motor Oil is built in the concept of perfect circles and has a vertical transitional axis.
Helvetica also has a higher x-height than Motor Oil.
Another difference is in the lining numbers, apart from the obvious differing visual styles, numbers such as 9 are very different between Motor Oil and Helvetica.
Motor Oil on the left, Helvetica on the right. Motor Oil has a straight sort of leg, whereas Helvetica has more of a looped bottom. Both slightly descend underneath the baseline.
Overall, looking at Motor Oil, if you want to make sure it's Motor Oil just by looking at one letterform, I'd check out the M. With sharp apexes and straight stems it's pretty unique, even compared to Futura which is strikingly similar.
A4 size spread for next weeks workshop done:
Greyscale
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