For a long time now, I've been trying to identify a font (Google was unable to do so): The one that's used for the episode titles in season 1. It's not Horizon, that's only used outside of the credits in seasons 2 and 3.
Any help would be greatly appreciated - thanks in advance!
This is actually something that I've been intending to research for a while now, so thank you to the OP for posting this, and kickstarting me into actually looking into it!
I also tweeted a graphics design acquaintance of mine yesterday, and he struck gold: the font's called Square 721 Bold BT. (Sometimes, the Extended Bold BT version was used.)
Kudos to your friend! Of course, Square 721 is basically Bitsream's version of Eurostile (which itself was based on Microgramma). Since Bitstream was only founded in 1981, I'm guessing it was probably actually Eurostile that the graphics department used on TOS.
(Please note that the online font sampler I used to capture the examples didn't seem to give me the ability to adjust the letter tracking, so I couldn't modify it to match the title cards more exactly.)
The earlier 1st-season episodes used something closer to Helvetica Bold Extended.
Similar, but it doesn't appear to be specifically Helvetica... the 'K' in "The Naked Time" is pretty much a giveaway. I think Univers is a pretty good match, though.
Interestingly, "Miri" appears to use a non-extended, oblique version, and seems to be the only episode to do so.
After that, it alternates with a third font first used for The Galileo Seven and last seen in The City on the Edge of Forever. I've yet to identify that one.
Edit: The third font seems to be a member of the Trade Gothic family.
I thought so too, but in doing a comparison, Trade Gothic doesn't appear to offer enough weight to match what we see, and there are differences in some of the letters, such as C and G.
So I decided to keep looking. I initially found some examples that looked really close, but turned out to have been designed in the 2000s, so they wouldn't have been available during the production of TOS.
I eventually managed to find one that I thought was possibly the answer: Standard CT. It was apparently first created in 1991, but it was a digital version of Standard, which had become popular initially in Switzerland in the 1950s.
It seemed *really* close... but note the difference in the 'G'. Now, I don't know if possibly that's a difference between Standard CT and the original Standard. I have tried to find something about the original version to verify... but having such a generic name as "Standard" is
not helping my searches any... especially since I don't actually know the original foundry.
So I continued looking, to see if I could find something similar to Standard CT, but with a G more like what I was expecting. And it turns out I was able to find something: Venus SB, which seems to have been designed in either 1907 or 1924, depending on what site you read.
As you can see, it is *extremely* similar, and has some similarities that Standard CT doesn't. For example, note that there is less space between the top and middle bars in the E in the screen captures, compared to the middle and bottom bars. Venus SB has this feature too, whereas in Standard CT, the spaces appear to be equal.
But aggravatingly, there is still one minor difference visible: the horizontal bar in the G has an angled end in Venus SB, whereas it is straight in the screen captures. Now, I don't know if this is because TOS used a version from a different foundry, which didn't include this feature, or something like that. But it is a difference. I have tried to search out a typeface similar to this, but with the bar on the G matching the screenshots. So far, I have not yet had any further success... but that doesn't mean there's not something out there somewhere! I think I need to take a break from it for now, but if anyone else wants to continue searching, feel free... hopefully this will give you a good starting point!
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