Fratello On Air: The Power Of Fonts On Watches

Lots of vintage Seiko watches have fantastic typography. Typography weighs heavily with most of my watch purchases.

The original SEIKO Champion 850 Alpinist J13079 dial was a favorite. The dial and hands were like nothing else.
The early “waterproof” dials made a real statement as well, spitting the black condensed san serif water and proof with the depth rating Arabic numeral in between in blue. Seiko really knew how to design with type then.

The slab serif KS on the King Seiko 5626 dials was perfect I thought. It was modern and impactful. And was part of a bigger picture with LM, KS, and GS marks from their typography portfolio. The original font used to spell out King Seiko was limp at best compared to the bold KS mark. The reissued model of late bears the limp version. I thought the 5626 case and dials was so much more worthy.

I loved the original Tissot word mark font that had a spontaneous handwritten feel too. Typography in general was better during the mid century period. So many lost brands from that era had creative type solutions as well. Great typography does not break the bank when designing a brand mark or entire dial and it showed then. Aesthetics ruled.

Angelus is a nice example of a word mark redrawn to fit inside a shape. Long gone company Phenix created a word mark family using different weights of the same font redrawn with a subtle S curve to the top of the lettering that was totally own-able. Nivada’s script versions used on Antarctic models varies almost wildly with the capital A and has a wonderfully quirky S for the Super Antarctic. They had several variations on the brand fonts as well from different versions of simple all caps bank gothic spelling out Croton Nivada Grenchen on two lines to almost playful italic serif versions for just Nivada. I tried to collect them all.

Designing with type has gone the way of the dodo these days for a lot of design categories. So much of it looks DIY because it is. Good typography has become a specialized art for the few. It kind of feels like it’s been simplified to a point where it feels uninspired. I use Cremo shave cream and they recently did a simplified take on their packaging that looks cleaner but it’s kind of horrifying what they did to the word mark and the crown logo.

Ironically for all of Seiko’s type history, the uninspired font they used for Spring Drive on the GS dials brings all of the premium design details of the watch down a notch for me. Spring Drive didn’t need a trademarked hand drawn solution, just a little more exploration and consideration to exist on the same dial as the black gothic font used for the GS and word mark.

Design is in the details. Typography is design.