How often does it happen? Too often with this film. Browsing around the web the other day, I came across a BLADE RUNNER poster* I hadn't seen before. It was a photo of Harrison Ford as Deckard, with an unfamiliar "BLADE RUNNER" logo, in yellow. At the bottom of the poster are the words "The National College Preview presented by Schlitz," with the Schlitz logo in place of the word.
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I suspect that these must have been produced prior to the general release of the movie, when the final graphics and logos had yet to be decided upon. These posters are very rare and good condition examples are extremely hard to find. I saw one on Ebay recently, I can't remember the exact figure, but $500 springs to mind. Ouch!
I quickly ran the logo through Photoshop, turning it black on white and uploaded it to the excellent WTF (What The Font) font identifier service. The result came back as "Impact." That old font!? That big chunky font, sitting in every Windows PC on the planet? Obviously it was an adapted version and finding no references to it, other than this poster and the cover of a book entitled "BLADE RUNNER - A Story of the Future," I took matters into my own hands and produced "Impact Runner," a font based on Impact, but with the minor adaptations displayed in the logo on the poster (and book). You can download it in the downloads section (Scroll down a bit, it's there.) Enjoy! :)
{rokbox title=|Impact Runner font sample|}images/stories/posts/impact_runner_th.png{/rokbox}
*The version linked to is a cleaned up version using "Impact Runner" to re-typeset the logo. Other fonts used are "Helvetica Condensed," "Century Gothic Bold" and "Helvetica Compressed," the latter of which I don't own, so had to substitute "Helvetica Condensed Bold."
