Stranger Things: meet the design genius behind TV's most talked about title font

The Duffer Brothers recently told The Hollywood Reporter that their title font is a “super important” aspect of their show. They wanted to capture the look and feel of the 15 book covers – the vast majority from Stephen King novels - that they sent to a design company called Imaginary Forces. The result was, they said, completely true to the feeling of being “in middle school or high school reading those paperbacks.”

Other viewers have experienced a lightbulb moment when they realise that the font is the same that is used on the children’s book series, Choose Your Own Adventure. Stranger Things shares its ability to make viewers travel through time with its title font, ITC Benguiat.

The man who designed ITC Benguiat is considered one of the type industry’s greats – and one of its longest-living. Ed Benguiat has created more than 600 fonts, many of which you will have used through a standard word processor. He also designed some of the most iconic logos and movie titles of the 20th century. And yet, outside of the graphic design industry, Benguiat is such a little-known name that even the Duffer Brothers hadn’t heard of the font named after him – let alone the man who created it.

For Benguiat, however, that’s ok – he hadn’t heard of Stranger Things, either. The first he knew of it, and the fact his typeface had such importance in it, was when I emailed him to see if he wanted to speak to me about it. The 88-year-old typographer (“But I tell everybody I’m 90”) replied instantly to my email in Helvetica, the font he uses “for mostly everything”, centered, in a range of sizes to make the first letters of our names tower over the others.

Benguiat gave me an instant review of Stranger Things’s titles during our phone conversation a few days later. “It merges, it moves in and out, it’s very good. It’s rather pleasing and comfortable too. And yet exciting at the same time. It’s rather appropriate, if I might say. It lends itself to the feeling of the titles, it has a look. It’s like food – it’s hard to describe what something tastes like, or identify a good smell.”

For the man who made the font, ITC Benguiat and Stranger Things is the design equivalent of catching a whiff of an apple pie in the oven.

For the thousands of design nerds in love with Stranger Things, the combination has been described as “pure, unadulterated typographic porn”. When I told Benguiat this, he simply laughed and said: “Well, have fun! Maybe my royalties will go up!”

Benguiat has traditionally used the ebb and flow of his royalties as a means of knowing if one of his fonts has swung into popularity; he had noticed a surge recently, which turned out to be due to Stranger Things. Like The Duffer Brothers, neither Stephen King nor The Smiths, who used the font on the cover of Strangeways, Here We Come, let Benguiat know before they used his font: “I only knew when I saw it on a newsstand or on a magazine, and I’d say, ‘Ooh, that’s mine’. But the royalties come in and that’s what I care about, primarily.”  

He remembers the days when his royalties were higher, namely because he had designed most of the fonts in existence. In 1970, along with fellow designers Aaron Burns, Herb Lubalin and Edward Rondthaler, Benguiat founded International Typeface Corporation, one of the first type firms to design digital fonts without a metal letter block in sight.

In doing so, they ushered in the death of the type shop. “We were the first ones to start it,” he recalls. “We were the first ones and the only ones, so we were the best ones.”

ITC Benguiat came along eight years later. It wasn’t, Benguiat says, his decision to give it his surname. “The president of Monotype [who had bought ITC by this time] said, ‘Why don’t we name it after you, Ed?’ And I said, ‘Oh, come on. My name is so difficult to spell, they’re not going to be able to say it or spell it.’”

But the name stuck. His intentions for ITC Benguiat were simple: “I just wanted it to be pretty and legible. I always thought that style was needed.”

Fortunately, it wound up being Benguiat’s favourite, too. “[Typefaces] are like you’re children. You have one child and you say, “that’s my favourite”, but you don’t let anybody know it. You have to keep it to yourself.”

“I use it a lot myself. I hardly use any fonts I’ve designed but I use that one a lot because I like it. I use it for logos, corporate identity, stationary, mostly branding. I have to be careful I don’t use it too much because then everyone will say, ‘Oh, he’s using his typefaces again!’”

By his own admission, Benguiat’s career has been one made of happy accidents. He says that the only thing he didn’t teach during his 50-year career at the School of Visual Arts was a course in being in the right place at the right time.

Benguiat grew up in Brooklyn, New York. The kind of kid who “was a smart ass and thought I could do anything”. He had a career as a jazz percussionist, playing the drums in the big bands of Stan Kenton and Woody Herman, after his father set him up with a drum kit when he was 10 and he took lessons.

Although he still played with bands until the fifties, his career was interrupted by the end of the Second World War. He signed up to the army after Pearl Harbour. “I wasn’t the right age”, Benguiat recalls. “My father forged my birth certificate so I would be the right age to enlist, which most kids did. Once I got in, they told me to be a pilot.”

Benguiat became a fighter pilot, flying in combat from Italy over Germany between 1944 and 1945. It sparked an obsession with planes for the rest of his life. “I’m an aeroplane freak,” he says, “I kept flying after the military. I had classic aeroplanes, racing planes. The best.” Now, his favourite pastime is to look up at the sky and watch them fly by.

Benguiat was interested in art from boyhood. It was a straightforward ambition that landed him in art school: “I didn’t know anything about it I just wanted to paint naked ladies.” It didn’t entirely work out: “My instructor said I better hurry up and get out of the art industry before I destroyed it because I couldn’t draw anything.” But, Benguiat realised, “if it was technical, I could draw it.”

The female form, however, dominated his first job. “Everybody laughs at this, but it’s true: I had to remove the cleavage from photographs of women.” Benguiat worked as a paste-up boy for magazines such as Photoplay, Movie Life and Movie Stars Parade. Under the draconian censorship laws of the Motion Picture Production Code, known in the industry as the Hays Code after its president, “licentious or suggestive nudity” and “excessive or lustful kissing” had to be removed from films - and film magazines.

“The magazines weren’t permitted to show the cleavage of a woman because Hay’s Office said it wasn’t proper,” Benguiat adds. “So I’d use an airbrush and re-touch it, or use a doily or something. I did that for two years.”

Typography had been in Benguiat’s family. His father was the display director of Bloomingdales, so he had access to his brushes and pens. After designing a logo for a company, he was asked to create an alphabet to match. It was his first foray into graphic design and corporate identity.

It was when Benguiat started working as a designer for Photo-Lettering, Inc - known in the trade as PLINC, a company that set headlines and advertising text - that he first started to see that royalty penny drop: “They sold the alphabets as words from the fonts I did, so that was the beginning for me.

“I said, ‘Gee, this is profitable, I can see me doing it’. I made a couple of dollars here and there and then the computer came along and they said, we need fonts. And my fonts were already there so they used the ones I had done previously. They weren’t pretty. They were rather ugly if I must say.”  

Desktop publishing, and the rise of ITC, eventually spelled the end for PLINC - despite Benguiat’s proposals to digitise their vast library of typefaces. It closed in the Eighties, and its library of letter sets stayed untouched in a storage facility in Manhattan until type foundry House Industries became its custodians in 2003 - only after Benguiat had egged them on to put a bid in for the archive. They collaborated on a small series of fonts inspired by Benguiat’s PLINC collection, which were released the year after.

Benguiat didn’t stop at fonts and typefaces. He made whole new fonts for films such as The Planet of the Apes and Super Fly and David Lynch's TV series Twin Peaks. He was nearly involved in the film adaptation of one of Stephen King’s novels, but production companies and the road accident which nearly left the author an amputee got in the way.

But, much as it was a logo that got him into the industry, it is logos which remain Benguiat’s most-prized work. “I’ve done the logo for The New York Times, I’ve done the logo for New York Magazine. For Sports Illustrated. The logo for Ford Cars.

“They’re my keepsakes in my mind so when I walk down the street I can say, ‘Hey, I did that.’ You know. I’m very proud of it. When I see the New York Times on a building on a wall, I can look up and say, ‘That’s my logo.’ So that’s my contribution to society.”

Benguiat continues to work, designing the odd logo, “sketching and drawing and doodling. But I don’t look forward to it because it’s a lot of work.” He prefers to keep up a weekly lunch date with the rest of graphic design’s old guard. Benguiat’s aware of the impact of the internet on typeface design, but, as someone who innovated the industry himself, doesn’t appear fearful.

“There’s a lot of good stuff out there. Plenty of good stuff,” he says. “The designers Matthew Carter, myself and many others, are kind of keeping an eye on things. We go to lectures, we go to talks. We educate people, and, as long as that’s around, it’s getting better and better.”

One of his greatest collaborators was Herb Lubalin, the ITC co-founder who designed the typeface Avant Garde, while Benguiat drew it. It was originally created for the late-Sixties magazine of the same name to which Benguiat the drawing. “Herb was, in my opinion, one of the finest typographic designers in the industry,” he says of his former colleague, who died in 1981.

Avant Garde is the font used in the Stranger Things for the credits, the names which dive in and out of the glowing red letters in ITC Benguiat. But the Duffer Brothers weren’t aware of this – it’s another happy accident. These masters of design have been brought together again, in the right place, at the right time.