Update on the Imperial Hotel renovation at Russell Square

Let's cut the chase*  – oh dear, it's as I feared. Here is an update about the renovation of this marvellous example of 1960's architecture.

It used to look like this, giving luxury airport vibes:

In my previous post I had written that I had been told that the orange letters (Eurostile/Microgramma with gilded outlines and recessed centres) would be reinstated. Er. No. 

A few weeks ago I noticed that much of the scaffolding had been removed. I snapped this image:

Here we can see that he orange letters have been replaced with some boring blocky letters that I'm pretty sure are from a typeface, a font, created for web use. The twelve letters (inc wd #) is now crammed into a panel that before contained just five letters.

It's just THE IMPERIAL now. The word HOTEL has been dropped. Hello cabbie, take me to The Imperial. Perhaps they then get driven to the war museum or the college, ha ha!

A closer look:

Check out the strange choice of letterform here, especially that ugly letter M which is overly wide and has a truncated centre. Unless this M is being used as a feature, some kind of impish design device on logos and branding, I see no reason to choose a 'font' that has such a bizarre quirk which is echoed only once here, at the top of the letter A. To add to this, some of the other letters have very slight angles on the ends of verticals and horizontals, such as the Es which have what I can only describe as italicised ends.  Ditto the very the top of the I (shudder). These quirks further highlight that the letters haven't been installed properly – some of them aren't straight – I mean, how is that possible when there's a simple golden grid to follow?!

I'm disappointed. People are often telling me I moan about things. That's not the case. I'm often merely disillusioned or saddened after hoping for a good outcome, made worse when things could have been better achieved so simply. Also, with my eye for typography and design I can often see that things haven't actually be designed or thought through properly.

Many logos on our high streets today are created as scalable vector files using web-based fonts designed for emails, and on-screen applications. Everything is becoming super-simplified, thus losing an sense of design. Logos or brand names are kept simple so that they can be scaled down small for use on an app icon or a web bar. Back in the day we would design a suite of logos for a client – a small logo for pens and business cards, a mid-sized version for print and press ads, and a larger more detailed one for shops signs, billboards and vehicles. Today, many logos that are simply typed out, often with no regard for letter-spacing. Ah well. This is progress. But I digress.

Here at the The Imperial (hotel) I suggest the letters are based on, probably pulled directly from, a modern scalable font designed for web use because sharp points on A, M, N, V, W, and Z do not scale or render very well on-screen, hence many new fonts designed specifically for computer use have been been pruned. Verdana, created in 1996 and shown below, is fast becoming one of the most ubiquitous typefaces, clearly outstripping Gill Sans, the Sans Serif favourite of the 1930s (British Rail, Penguin Books, BBC, Tommy Hilfger etc). 

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 

I'm also not a fan of Verdana's topped and tailed capital 'I' – there is another similar typeface being used a lot lately that also employs this same device – it implements even wider bars making short words like PIN, HIT and BIO and look very strange indeed (ugh!) – if you can identify it, please let me know.

Thanks for getting this far – I had intended this post to be just a quick update with a couple of pictures and captions, but I got a bit carried away!

*Cut to the chase – surely this should be 'cut out the chase'? Do we not get straight to the point after saying this and miss out the journey?