Written by Stephen Coles on September 4, 2007

For a long time Brendan Dawes’ saulbass.net was probably the most popular online destination for devotees of the great designer and film title director, Saul Bass. The website was lost when Dawes did what many of us do: neglected to renew the domain. Fortunately, it’s back again in most of its former glory at saulbass.tv.

One of the few goodies missing in this reincarnation is the free font download called “Hitchcock”. Used by Dawes throughout the site, Hitchcock was created by designer Matt Terich as an homage to the iconic lettering that so often appeared in Bass’ title work. The font is not a faithful digitization of any particular title sequence or poster — in fact, type designer Nick Shinn notes that Bass didn’t do the actual lettering and veteran Robert Trogman adds that Dave Nagata did most of the drawings — but it does give a general sense of Bass’ rough, hand-cut style.





Matt plans to expand Hitchcock’s character set someday. We hope he’ll add alternates to help it better emulate hand lettering. In the meantime, this version will suffice for the hobbyist when used with care and at smaller sizes.

See more of Matt’s poster art and web development at Design Medicine. He and his wife also recently built an art studio in their backyard with two letterpresses and one screen press for their invitation enterprise, Ink Fancy.

Matt has given us permission to host Hitchcock at Typographica:

Please don’t redistribute the font files or post them to any other website. To share the fonts, link to this page (the direct download URLs could change at any moment).

If Hitchcock isn’t quite what you’re after, other fonts in this vein include: