Have you noticed how 1970s fonts have made a comeback? I have. In fact, there seems to be a huge appetite for the whole decade again, particularly in television, fashion and branding.
I'm going to warn you, this story is going to ramble on a bit, and it might get a bit weird. But stick with it. It's worth it. I hope.
People generally describe the 1970s as a colourful decade. But that isn’t how I remember it.
Brown, orange everywhere.
Brown wallpaper, brown clothes, orange crockery and cheap mass-produced furniture pretending to be mid-century modern.
As a kid, I wanted the bright blues, reds, yellows and greens I saw in cartoons and programmes such as Thunderbirds.
The 1970s revival has repackaged the decade as something clean and colourful. Those colours look great now. At the time, though, all that brown and orange felt pretty bloody dull—and the decade certainly didn’t look or feel this tidy.
Let’s jump right in with the TV shows.
Revived TV Shows
Television has been revisiting the 1970s too, bringing back its music, clothes and interiors.
US shows
- Daisy Jones & The Six — 2023. A fictional rock band rises to fame before suddenly breaking apart at its peak.
- Minx — 2022. An idealistic feminist and a seedy publisher create an erotic magazine for women in 1970s Los Angeles.
- The Get Down — 2016. Young musicians and artists find their voice amid the birth of hip-hop and disco in New York in 1977.
- Mrs. America — 2020. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly campaigns against the Equal Rights Amendment during the 1970s.
- The Deuce — 2017. New York’s sex trade and pornography industry expand around Times Square throughout the decade.
- Vinyl — 2016. A troubled record executive fights to save his label amid New York’s changing music scene in 1973.
- The Offer — 2022. Producer Albert S. Ruddy battles to get The Godfather made in early-1970s Hollywood.
- The Continental — 2023. A young Winston Scott enters New York’s criminal underworld in this 1975 John Wick prequel.
- Dark Winds — 2022. Two Navajo police officers investigate violent crimes in the American Southwest during the early 1970s.
UK shows
- The Serpent — 2021. A conman and serial killer targets travellers along Southeast Asia’s 1970s hippie trail.
- Call the Midwife — 2012. The continuing BBC drama reached 1970 in its 2025 series and moved into 1971 in 2026.
- A Very English Scandal — 2018. The Jeremy Thorpe story spans the late 1960s and 1970s, culminating in his trial in 1979.
- Life on Mars — 2006. A modern police officer wakes up in Manchester in 1973 and finds himself working under old-school policing methods.
Of all those shows, Daisy Jones & The Six caught my eye for a different reason: its typography.
It was an Amazon Original about a fictional rock band in the 1970s, and its title uses a bastardised version of Benguiat Caslon.
Of course it looks ’70s—the whole show’s set in the 1970s. Not exactly rocket science. The bit I like is the type: the flourishes, the high contrast, that faint ’60s echo. Benguiat Caslon pulls it back into the ’70s. It fits the show. Job done.
British television gave us some pretty memorable shows, though some are definitely hard to watch now. They were openly racist and sexist, so they’re no longer shown on TV. They aren’t rerun—and rightly so.
America, meanwhile, seemed to turn out hit after hit. I didn’t see most of them; they never made it onto UK screens. But these are some of the programmes that helped define the decade.
Television programmes associated with the 1970s
American television programmes
- The Brady Bunch — 1969–1974
- All in the Family — 1971–1979
- The Jeffersons — 1975–1985
- Maude — 1972–1978
- Good Times — 1974–1979
- The Partridge Family — 1970–1974
- The Mary Tyler Moore Show — 1970–1977
- Happy Days — 1974–1984
- MASH* — 1972–1983
- Laverne & Shirley — 1976–1983
- One Day at a Time — 1975–1984
- Sanford and Son — 1972–1978
- The Love Boat — 1977–1987
- Charlie’s Angels — 1976–1981
- Three’s Company — 1976–1984
- The Carol Burnett Show — 1967–1978
- Wonder Woman — 1975–1979
- Little House on the Prairie — 1974–1983
- The Waltons — 1972–1981
- The Six Million Dollar Man — 1974–1978
- The Rockford Files — 1974
- Starsky and Hutch — 1975–1979
- The Incredible Hulk — 1977–1982
British television programmes
- Fawlty Towers — 1975–1979
- The Good Life — 1975–1978
- Are You Being Served? — 1972–1985
- Dad’s Army — 1968–1977
- George & Mildred — 1976–1979
- Porridge — 1974–1977
- Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em — 1973–1978
- Upstairs, Downstairs — 1971–1975
- I, Claudius — 1976
- The Onedin Line — 1971–1980
- Doctor Who — 1963–present
- Blake’s 7 — 1978–1981
- Space: 1999 — 1975–1977
That ’70s look as a typeface
Look through any font site, like Creative Market, MyFonts or one of the other big font sites, and you’ll see plenty of type inspired by the 1970s.
But it isn’t only the letterforms. It’s the mockups, the photography used in them, the colours and the styling.
You don’t just get shown a typeface. You get the entire decade in little thumbnails.
Why the lettering became so expressive
The typography we associate with the 1970s didn’t suddenly appear in 1970. A lot of it was already bubbling away in the 1960s, alongside the cleaner, more ordered typography of modernism. By the 1970s, those expressive ideas had really taken hold.
New typesetting technology helped make that freedom possible.
This is a bit geeky, but it’s time for a little history lesson. Here we go.
With phototypesetting, machines such as the PhotoTypositor exposed letters one at a time onto photographic paper. Letraset put individual letters on transfer sheets, ready to be rubbed onto the artwork. Both gave designers direct control over the spacing and position of every character: they could pull letters close together, let them overlap or push them out of line. The type could become part of the image, not just a neat row of characters.
Imagine building a headline by rubbing each Letraset character onto your artwork, one letter at a time. Calling it patience would be an understatement. It took a steady hand and a long time.
Designers today are lucky they don’t have to work that way. You can simply type your words onto the screen.
But back then, that was the way of doing it.
That was the technology of the time. Nowadays, designers can do almost anything they want. So what does that freedom look like in typefaces inspired by the ’70s?
Five modern typefaces doing the 1970s thing
Recoleta
It pulls in those soft, rounded serifs you saw everywhere in the 70s, particularly the Cooper and Windsor vibe. Friendly, warm, a bit playful.
Losta Masta
Heavy contrast, dramatic curves, that record sleeve swagger. A modern take on the thick-thin display styles that feels at home with that era.
Grand Slang
Big, sweeping calligraphic curves. Its stated inspiration is mid-century American calligraphy, but the flowing forms echo the kind of lettering you saw in the 1970s.
Ramdone
Same idea. Big personality, bold curves, but I’ll keep to appearances rather than claiming a direct lineage.
TAN Mon Chéri
Soft curves, exaggerated swashes and a sun-drenched sort of glamour. It leans into the polished, retro-chic side of the 1970s rather than the psychedelic end of it.
We spent years taking things away
For a while, branding seemed to be heading in completely the opposite direction.
Serifs disappeared. Logos became simpler.
Everything got cleaned up and stripped back. Digital screens were often part of the reasoning: identities needed to work everywhere from a huge shop sign to a tiny phone screen.
You can see that simplification happening across some very big brands:
- Burberry (2018) replaced its distinctive serif wordmark with a bold uppercase sans serif. Perhaps the best example because in 2023 it changed direction again, returning to a serif wordmark and reviving its Equestrian Knight.
- Calvin Klein (2017) adopted a stark all-caps sans-serif treatment. It wasn't a serif-to-sans change, but it was part of the same fashion-industry move towards stripped-back typography.
- Mailchimp (2018) replaced its recognisable handwritten wordmark with a lowercase wordmark and paired it with a simplified black-and-white version of Freddie, its chimp mascot.
- Yahoo (2019) replaced its more eccentric lettering with a controlled lowercase sans-serif identity by Pentagram.
- Santander (2018) simplified its identity with slimmer typography and more white space, specifically citing the need to work better across digital and mobile environments.
The reasoning made sense. Simpler typography generally behaves itself whether it’s six feet high or squeezed onto a phone.
But everything eventually starts to look the same and boring. People get tired of it. They want something new, something fresh.
Burberry changed its mind
Burberry is particularly interesting because it almost tells the whole story on its own.
It went from heritage serif to stripped-back sans serif, then five years later headed back towards a more characterful serif identity.
Now the pendulum seems to be swinging back, at least for product design and packaging.
Burger King is a good example. If you look below, you can see how fully it’s embraced the decade’s colour palette.
Serifs are getting bigger, bolder and more exaggerated. Designers are playing with contrast, strange proportions, chunky shapes and exaggerated ink traps.
You can see that shift most clearly in packaging, where bold curves, nostalgic colours and oversized lettering are suddenly everywhere again.
Personally, I like it.
I like bold fonts. I like headline fonts. I like type that actually has something to say for itself.
The 1970s I actually remember
It doesn’t remind me of actually living through that decade. That’s a different story. But it does give you the vibe, the feel of the 1970s in such a minimalist, modern world.
This is where it’s going to get weird. I’m going down a path I shouldn’t really. Evel Knievel. Yeah, baby.
Evel Knievel
One thing I do remember very clearly is my Evel Knievel wind-up toy.
It was brilliant.
You wound the thing up, pointed Evel at a ramp and let him go, usually straight into whatever happened to be on the other side. Every boy loves that sort of toy.
As a kid, I couldn’t understand why Evel Knievel would risk life and limb just to entertain us. He seemed completely fearless because, frankly, he was completely fearless. An absolute total nutter.
And as a child of the ’70s, I loved that. Every child was fearless in the ’70s. We did what we wanted, when we wanted—unless it was dinner time and our mum called us in. Hilarious.
And there’s one particular stunt I remember: Evel Knievel coming to Wembley Stadium in 1975 to jump 13 buses. He actually cleared them, but crashed on the landing, breaking his pelvis and his hand. Around 90,000 people had turned up to watch.
Looking back, that seems extraordinary. Here was a bloke risking serious injury on a motorbike, and we watched it as family entertainment.
I don’t think you’d get away with that now. In fact, I know you wouldn’t.
Television ran on a timetable
Television itself was completely different.
I remember Blue Peter, Play School, The Magic Roundabout, Mr Benn, The Wombles and all the rest of it.
But we had very little choice.
There weren’t dedicated children’s channels running all day. You waited for children’s television to start.
I remember sitting there with the test card on the television, waiting for the programmes to come on.
Why did the BBC use a test card?
As a kid, I found that test card bloody annoying. I hated it. Why didn’t they just put the telly on and show us TV programmes? Why show that stupid test card?
- Engineers used its colour bars, lines and shapes to check picture quality and adjust TVs. The Science Museum Group describes it as a calibration tool.
- TV shops and repairers used the same image to set up and check television sets, as The Guardian’s history of Test Card F explains.
- It filled gaps in the schedule with a useful test image, often accompanied by music.
- It wasn’t to give transmitters a rest: they still had to broadcast the card.
- Longer schedules cost money, but saving programme costs wasn’t the test card’s main purpose.
The familiar daytime test card largely disappeared in 1983, when Pages from Ceefax took over most of those gaps in the schedule. It occasionally popped up after that, but by then its everyday role was effectively over.
Ceefax: the internet before the internet
Ceefax was the BBC’s text-based information service, carrying news, weather, listings and scores until it closed in 2012.
I bloody hated Ceefax as well. As a child, I didn’t want to know about the cheapest flights to Malaga or what the share price was doing. None of that interested me. I just wanted programmes. Just give me programmes. I wanted to watch the programmes. Where are the programmes?
Our bit of the day was roughly four until six.
That wouldn’t happen now. Children can watch something whenever they want.
Abigail’s Party
Then there was Abigail’s Party.
Mike Leigh’s play appeared on BBC television as part of Play for Today, which makes it particularly useful here.
It isn’t a modern recreation of the decade. It was made right in the middle of it.
Beverly’s living room feels like someone preserved a piece of the decade in a jar. The furniture, clothes, drinks, music and colours are all there.
Demis Roussos goes on the record player, the gin comes out and cheese and pineapple appears on cocktail sticks.
The rounded furniture, moulded plastics, wood-effect finishes and clashing earth tones weren’t incidental details.
Product design had become softer and more tactile, with avocado green, harvest gold and burnt orange appearing on everything from sofas to alarm clocks.
The look was bigger than typography
It’s interesting looking at it now because it reminds me that what we currently call the 1970s look was never just typography.
The type sat alongside fashion, interiors, packaging, album covers, music and television.
We remember all of it together, then somehow compress that entire visual atmosphere into a handful of colours and letter shapes.
The sound came with a look
The decade’s biggest albums carried the same visual atmosphere through photography, illustration, typography and confident graphic simplicity. Even when the styles differed, the sleeves still felt unmistakably of their time.
The colours that stayed with us
The same was true of colour. Avocado green, harvest gold, burnt orange and chocolate brown escaped the record sleeve and spread across packaging, interiors and product design.
The food wasn't quite so glamorous
I remember the food too, and it certainly wasn't all fondue sets and cocktail sticks.
The food I remember was bland and functional.
Boring mashed potato. Meat and two veg. Corned beef hash. Chips and egg.
After having spent most of the week eating overcooked veg with mashed potato and the same old meat, having chips on a Friday was actually a real treat and we loved it. And boy did we put tons of ketchup on those chips.
For mash, get Smash
And then there was Smash instant mashed potato.
Smash had been around since the 1960s, but the famous Martians arrived on television in the 1970s. They'd sit there laughing at us humans for going to all the trouble of peeling and boiling real potatoes.
“For mash, get Smash.”
I remember those adverts vividly. They felt clever, funny and strangely futuristic at the time.
The packaging and advertising had to work hard on increasingly crowded supermarket shelves.
Brands used chunky lettering, flat illustrations, bright stripes and unapologetically clashing colours. Even instant mashed potato looked as though it had arrived from the future.
The humble potato pretty much ruled the roost. Ready meals were rare, pizza and McDonald’s weren’t part of normal life, and even pasta felt exotic. It wasn’t really until the 1980s that things began to change.
Microwaves arrived, supermarkets got more interesting, fizzy drinks became more varied and suddenly there seemed to be a lot more choice.
That’s another reason why the modern version of the 1970s feels different from actually living through it.
We remember the colours and the style. Nobody seems particularly keen to revive the mashed potato.
Some 1970s fonts aren't from the 1970s
This is where it gets interesting.
The strange thing about 1970s typography is that some of the typefaces we now associate most strongly with the decade weren't designed in the 1970s at all.
Cooper Black is the obvious example.
Oswald Bruce Cooper designed Cooper Black in 1921, and it was released commercially in 1922.
That means it was already around 50 years old by the time it became so strongly associated with 1970s popular culture.
Yet the 1970s adopted it so enthusiastically that it now feels completely tied to the period.
Look at L.A. Woman by The Doors, released in 1971.
Big, soft, rounded and shamelessly curvy. It looks exactly like what we now think a 1970s typeface should look like.
The decade didn't invent Cooper Black.
It adopted it.
And after seeing it repeatedly on album covers, advertising, packaging and other printed material, we've collectively filed those shapes away in our heads under 1970s.
That’s important when we talk about the current revival.
We're not necessarily recreating the 1970s.
We're recreating what we remember the 1970s looking like.
Nostalgia remembers the good bits
The 1970s weren't one enormous fondue party with a brilliant soundtrack.
There were strikes, power cuts, rubbish piling up, inflation and plenty of other things that weren't particularly enjoyable.
But memory isn't an archive. It's a highlights reel.
So when we look back at the 1970s, we tend to remember Evel Knievel, the album covers, Bagpuss, Mr Benn, the toys, clothes, colours and music.
What we're left with is a reel of good vibes.
And that's the version of the 1970s we're designing with now.
That’s especially true for younger type designers who weren't even born in the 1970s. Some of them weren't born in the '80s or '90s either.
Is it becoming a cliché?
Yes. But isn't everything eventually?
A lot of type designers seem to be looking at old 1970s print advertising and adding their own small spin to it.
Sometimes the spin is genuinely interesting. Sometimes it feels more like a revival for revival’s sake.
But I'm fairly pragmatic about that.
Everything gets recycled eventually if you wait around long enough.
Every decade has something that makes it visually distinctive.
There aren't infinite completely original directions waiting patiently to be discovered.
Fashion comes back.
Music comes back.
Graphic design comes back.
Typography comes back.
They all feed one another.
Old for one person, new for another
That's also why I don't think recycling an old idea is necessarily a bad thing.
People like fresh things.
The slightly odd part is that something doesn't actually have to be new to feel new.
For someone who remembers the 1970s, this sort of typography can trigger nostalgia.
You recognise something in the shapes, even if you can't quite remember where you've seen it before.
For a younger designer, there's no childhood memory attached to it.
They might simply see a great-looking typeface.
Although even then, they're unlikely to encounter it completely without context.
They've seen old album covers. They've watched films and television programmes set in the 1970s. They've seen the clothes coming back into fashion.
Design, fashion and music all get tangled together.
Eventually something old works its way around again and finds a new audience.
So why has the 1970s made a comeback?
I think the main reason is that things get rehashed and seen with fresh eyes. Young designers see the 1970s differently; nostalgia sells. Popular culture looks back, and when a new programme is set in the decade, the clothes, music and type come with it. There’s also a reaction against whatever looks dominant now—often something clean and minimalist. That can bring the 1970s back into view, too.
I like the revival. I like big serifs and bold display fonts. I'm not particularly bothered that some of the ideas have been around before.
Design doesn’t have to ignore the past to feel new. Sometimes it means taking an idea people already know and giving it a different context.