Original Cobra Font Style

[TL Marcel]

I'm doing some design work and needed to use the Cobra font. I worked with an old friend, Andy Benedek, an acknowledged font expert - also logo design, etc (www.fontfactory.co.uk). Here's what he said:


"The font for the COBRA logo is based upon the typeface Microgramma, published by the Nebolio Foundry in 1972. Microgramma was designed by A Butti and A Novarese. The design was based upon squares with rounded corners—although the actual typeface is more sophisticated than that. It has no lowercase letters. It became available in two weights (normal and bold) and three widths (condensed, normal and extended). Eurostyle is very similar to Microgramma, but has lowercase letters. Eurostyle was also designed by A Novarese and was launched in 1962. Eurostile also had a additional width, compact.

Although the COBRA logo was based upon Microgramma extended, it would almost certainly have been hand lettered to get exactly the required weight. Looking at the early logos, the word COBRA has a lighter weight which gets bolder, the later the logo.
Just when the inline was first inserted into the logo, I don't know. In our project we created a weight just lighter than the bold. "


Hope that adds to the forum's body of knowledge. Can upload clean electronic copies of the logo/font to the forum if that would be of help to anyone.


Regards,
M