Bandit LOAF

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
You know it when you see it, and you see it more than you expect in marketing, signage and other games: the 'Wing Commander font'. But what is that font? Well, the typeface you associate with the earlier Wing Commander games was derived from a font called Stop. It's so named because of the reaction you have to its bold, unique appearance, similar to how you might react to a bright red stop sign. Stop was developed by a graphic designed named Aldo Novarese for Studio Nebiolo in 1970 and it has been used to suggest the sense of bold future ever since (though today it's more of a "future of the past" as we've come to associate Stop heavily with the tomorrow of the 1980s)!





Want to learn more? Tiopteca has an elegant article offering the history of the type called Memorable Stop. And here's a wonderful website called Fonts in Use which offers a collection of real world examples of Stop being used in everything from pamphlets to outdoor signage to protest buttons to, of course, video games! Copies of stop are readily available online and you can purchase the real thing for about $30. One thing is for sure, over half a century later 'Stop' is still going.




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Original update published on August 13, 2026
 
Working with the letter "I" in the font is a tricky prospect, as I discovered when I was working on the cover of the RPG back in 2013. Some folks can get a solid looking character (as with "Promised Land" in the pics and indeed with the words "Wing Commander" themselves), but the font face default is effectively a lowercase I (and it makes no distinction between capital and lowercase letters). I'd been told that the pipe character | would produce the correct result but I had no luck. I wound up having to use GIMP to paint out that gap.

Only did that for the cover. Elsewhere in the text where I use the font, you can see the lowercase i everywhere.
 
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