This paint­ing shows a part of the East­side Gallery in Berlin, a stretch of Berlin Wall along the river Spree. The only sub­stan­tial part of the wall that’s been left stand­ing because it is cov­ered in pic­tures. Those get repainted now and again, as the paint­ing by Edward B Gor­don shows. In spite of his English-sounding name he is a Ger­man painter liv­ing in Berlin and has been putting out a paint­ing a day for 900 days now.

There are two rea­sons why I am show­ing this here:
1. Gordon’s paint­ings show the Berlin I know; not always roman­tic, not always bright, not always flat­ter­ing, but always observed with affec­tion and painted quickly, before the moment goes away. Great stuff, all Oil on Board, 15x15cm (i.e. 6×6 inches).
2. Although there are only three and a half let­ters to be seen, it seems enough to iden­tify the type­face. Five steps away from the orig­i­nal – painted type on wall, paint­ing of that scene, repro­duc­tion in the news­pa­per, scan on my desk­top, repro­duced on your desk­top – I iden­ti­fied it as FF Type­s­tar.

Except for that r. And the i. Seems like who­ever painted these let­ters knew more about type than most graphic design­ers and cer­tainly used the free­dom of the brush to shorten that long hook on the r and the long top serif on the i. A clever solu­tion to avoid a gap that would draw too much atten­tion to this combination.