Hi guys we are preparing for the off season, and we would like to modify the fonts on our bumpers. I’m using Inventor to design the bumper styles and I’d like to learn what fonts do you recommend? Thanks!
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The font we use and the font I would recommend are not the same font. For nearly our entire existence we’ve used a font named Boink LET:
It’s easily visible and pretty much a defining trait for our team by now.
The font I would recommend is any non-serif font that meets the requirements of this past season, so unbroken characters with a stroke width of at least 1/2".
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We had someone make our numbers this year and last year for us to heat press on, so I don’t know what exactly they used. Looks like a variation of Arial that I can’t clock, like Arial Bold but with more rounded corners.
2815 and 4901 used variations of ITC Machine for most of my time with them, driven by trying to ape the stylings of the Gamecocks’ athletics department of the time. (Garnet Squadron’s was lightly customized at the 4 and used a completely custom 0, which I’d edit further if they were still active to remove the inner stroke to remove any doubt that it’s a numeral and not “a logo”.)
Honestly, find something that works with your team’s style and run with it.
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We’ve been using the same font for a couple of years now, mostly because it’s actually one of the official branding fonts of FIRST, partially because of its utterly appropriate name, and partially because it’s just a great font for bumper numbers: Roboto. We use it in its bold, italic form to get a solid but kind of racy look to the numbers. Since we cut them on a vinyl cutter from insignia cloth, we can apply them as a group to the bumpers and get a perfect alignment and spacing. We think they look great and they’re certainly easy to read for refs and announcers. Here’s this season’s robot, Charles, with these numbers:
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Years ago we used some variant of the Twitch font. It was awkward.
I looked for a font with the “open top” 4. Personally don’t like the closed 4.
Found this: SF Transrobotics Font | dafont.com
Use it on our shirts, bumpers, banners, etc. May have changed height of numbers for bumpers, but like the look.
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We use a modified custom font “Bauer” - it’s based on the logo for the hockey company. Our version is modified to be correctly kerned for our team name and numbers.
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We’ve used Hemi Head Bold-Italic as our main font since 2011 (I don’t believe we had any specific font in 2010). We use it as our main logo font on our shirts, promotional/media items, our bumpers, etc.
We normally embroider on the letters, but this year we decided to use vinyl and heat press them on, (something that’d become very handy later in the season).
Taken from our Visual Identity Guide:
Some examples:
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We used to use whatever stickers we bought, but now we have switched to Edge of the Galaxy, the font on our shirts, and other branding.
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We tried our hardest to match 1114s font but wanted something easily accessible so we eventually settled on Roboto Black Italicized.
If your number has a lot of 1s and 4s I highly recommend:
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In line with our Rainforest branding, we purchased Jungle Kids font and use the bold and italicized numbers for our bumpers.
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Braille didn’t make the cut…
…and AprilTags was a hard sell…
…but we have used “Impact” (a mac font?) a few years.
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So cool to see another team using Hemi Head (Bold / Italic)! We discovered it a few years ago on dafont.com while searching for a new set of bumper numbers. We also use it on the back of our shirts. It’s so clean!
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We have been using a custom font which is basically our logo as the number is a part of our teams logo
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