I discovered Square 721 while perusing a copy of the works: anatomy of a city by Kate Ascher, a fun book about the urban planning and design of new york city. The book, published by penguin, is really fun to look through, loaded with illustrations, quirky footnotes and is set in both Square 721 for heads and Eureka for body text.
Square 721 along with its bastard doppelgänger Square 711 are both published by Bitstream. It turns out, though, that Square 711 is just another version of Georg Trump’s City and that Square 721 is actually a variant of Aldo Novarese’s Eurostile. My guess is that it is probably easier to pitch a name as generic as Square 721 for a book about New York rather than, say, Eurostile during a casual crit. Just my guess.
And while Eurostile is sorta a love it or hate it thing, City is actually the real deal. It’s got the same unabashed love of 1930s heavy industry that i love about Tower, but it’s even more rigid and it has an absolutely ridiculous ampersand that’s hard not to love. It’s that strict rigidity in City that makes it completely fantastic when, for example, Gridnik loses that magic luster it once had. but let’s not lie to ourselves, that never really happens, right?
