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I recently received a message asking what font I used to make the Lain logo artwork on my Website. The answer makes an interesting story. Since I eventually planed to do a different post here on the meaning of Lain through its typography (which incorporated discussion about the Lain logo font), I thought I'd might as well do it now and split them into two posts. So here, for your enjoyment, is part one. The "Lain logo" I'm referring to is the familiar "lain" written in a large typewriter font with "serial experiments" above, and the red, backward "Close the world, Open the nExt" phrase below. It's on the front of the VHS and DVD cases. You can't miss it. I'll state right off I didn't scan in the logo. Instead, I recreated it using Adobe Illustrator. One might ask, why go through all the trouble of recreating the logo? Isn't a scan good enough? Well, there are several reasons: * The source material (scanned or as an existing bitmapped file) isn't large enough, or isn't high enough in quality when extracted from a such a small size. The edges don't come out smooth or clear enough, and you want it to be perfect. Ahhh, what one will do for art... ;-) * You estimate it would take more "mental energy" by masking out and removing the background from a scan than it would take expending "physical energy" in recreating the logo. And you *do* want to remove the background so it can be used with your own work. * You consider the logo "fan art" and want to say something by making your own version. * You don't have access to a scanner. OK, so I convinced myself the way to go was to recreate the logo. Silly me! ;-) I'll discuss each logo element separately.
* lain * The word "lain", the largest word in the logo, is written in a typewriter font (also called a typeface--but I'll ignore that distinction here.) OK, so which font is it? It's claimed by Chiaki Konaka, story writer for the series, it's "Love Letter Typewriter." He even provides the font on his Website (see the very end for the Web address.) By looking carefully at the shape of the letters in the font, you'll see it's *not* Love Letter Typewriter. It comes close though.
 In Figure 1, I have typed the font (in green) over a logo scan (in black). The original scan is thinner and has more bumpy edges in places than Love Letter Typewriter. OK, so the font doesn't match exactly. What I think happened was the font was used as a starting point for the word "lain." Additional editing was done, including the placement of a "thumb print" in the "a" character. Or, perhaps a similar typewriter font was used and edited.
 So here's what I did. In Adobe Illustrator, I typed out "lain" using Love Letter Typewriter and converted the font to outline shapes. As marked in Figure 2a, the "i" dot and "l" fragments were removed. Now while I could have traced over every nook and cranny in the original logo for 100% accuracy, *that* would have been excessive. ;-) I found it "satisfactory" to use Love Letter Typewriter's own similar appearance and modify it from there. Yeah, I could have gone all out... but I wanted to keep my sanity. :-) Next, I turned my attention to the letter "a." Notice how the top loop of the "a" barely touches the middle curve and a "thumb print" is in the loop? See Figure 1 for the comparison and Figure 2b with the areas in question circled. To make it more like the original, I made shapes (in red in Figure 2c) over the "a" and "subtracted" them out using Illustrator's pathfinder tools. This resulted in the top loop appearing thinner, a "thumb print" being seen, and the bottom loop appearing broken. Then I created the "i" dot with a circle. I typed in a white "e" (using the Avant Garde font--it came close to what was used.) I then rotated the "e", and "subtracted" it from the circle. The result can be seen in Figure 2b. * serial experiments * Next, as seen in Figure 2b, I typed "serial experiments." As a side note, trying to match a typeface to an original source can be tricky. I'll talk a bit more about that latter on. I'm sorry to say that in my vast collection of fonts *sob* *sniff* I didn't have anything which matched very well. Even in all my searching of the Wired, er um, the 'Net... I couldn't find a close match with its lowercase, thin, and rounded letter forms. The closest font I considered to be even acceptable was "Angela Sans." If you compare the original in Figure 1 (in black) and Figure 2b, you'll see it has somewhat similar thin and rounded letter shapes. Other fonts I looked at might have been thin but weren't rounded. All well... so much for approaching perfection. :-O I used all uppercase letters to get better letter shapes from the font. If anyone knows of a better matching font, please oh please, let me know! :-) * Close the world, Open the nExt * The Lain logo has this phrase. I didn't include it in my artwork because I wanted to use the "No matter where you are..." phrase instead--but in another spot. But I do want to mention it here to give a glimpse into matching fonts. As I said before, matching a typeface to an original source can be tricky. You have to have enough characters of the original in which to see various little shapes, bumps, and fancy details so it can be matched with a font using similar details. You should also have lots of fonts so you can see which variations come closest to the original. And finally, you have to be observant enough in the first place and notice the small details.
 As seen in Figure 3, I've typed out five letters from the phrase using three candidate fonts. Notice how the top hook in the "C" is slightly different in all three? The hook comes to a point in Times, has "sawed off" hook ends in Century School Book, and has a single hook in Palatino. Another detail to look at is the thickness of the sides of a letter. The side thickness of the "O" is aimed straight down in the first two fonts, but slanted in Palatino. Still another thing to look for are "fancy details." Notice that the top of the "t" and "r" characters have different shapes between the fonts. So which font was used? Actually, it's hard to tell because the type is sooooooo small on the original box. It's hard to make out the details which would let me say one way or the other. "My final answer" is that it's none of these, but it does combine certain elements of Century School Book and Times. I guess I'll have to keep on looking. * The handwriting font * In my artwork, I wrote the phrase "No matter where you are..." in the handwriting-type font seen several times during Lain.
 The good news is I've matched the letter shapes with 100% certainty, as can be seen in Figure 4. The font is called "Lefty Bold" and is part of the "Lefty Casual" package. You may notice the font is slightly bolder than the original, which is taken from a screen shot. I'm not totally sure why, but I think additional "weights" or thicknesses of the font are available (for those who send in the shareware fee) and this is a "lighter" version. At least, that's how I interpret the font's README file. Maybe not. The origional's letter spacing is also adjusted.
* The final result * With all my work finally done in Illustrator, the end result is a file which I can scale to any size I choose and still have smooth, clear edges. The logo can be brought into its own layer in Photoshop and used over any background, as seen in Figure 2d. * Font Sources *
"Love Letter Typewriter"
The font can be downloaded from several places--including Chiaki Konaka's Website (see the "resources" page):
"Angela Sans"
"Lefty Casual" This ends part 1 of my post on Lain and its logo typography. Part 2 is more content oriented (*BIG BIG spoilers*). I'll explore why specific fonts might have been chosen by the creators of Lain for the logo and what clues they offer in interpreting the series. On to part 2!
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