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shirt numbers

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Introduction
Germany 1996
Willem II 2002
Real Madrid 2003
AC Milan 2004
Chelsea 2004
Roda JC 2004
FC Utrecht 2004
Ajax 2004
Cameroon 2004
Italy 2004
Sporting 2004
Bayern München 2005
Schalke 04
Real Madrid 2005
FC Twente 2005
NAC/Vitesse 2005
Italy 2006
Netherlands 2006
Sevilla 2006

FC Twente (Enschede, the Netherlands) introduced new shirt numbers in the summer of 2005. An original choice! The typeface that is used is either Ionic no. 5 (1925) or Excelsior (1931) or Corona (1941). These three typefaces were designed by Chauncey H. Griffith (1879-1956). Of course, his purpose wasn't to create shirt numbers. Griffith intention was to make a legible typeface for newspapers. And he succeeded; Ionic no. 5, Excelsior and Corona were – and still are – popular typefaces.
Bitstream, a producer of digital fonts, sells these typefaces under different names: News 701 and News 702 and News 705. When a football team uses one of these faces for shirt numbers, that's big News! It's remarkable that these figures, that are designed to be used at small sizes, are so beautifull when they are enlarged. And the legibility is very good.
FC Twente shows that you don't need weird numbers to design a characteristic shirt.

PS. A more close look at the Twente-numbers showed that 7 has a straight bottom line. So I had to reconsider my judgement: the typeface used by Twente isn't Excelsior/News 702, but Clarendon Bold (slightlycondensed).

news702

Figures from Excelsior.

clarendon

Figures from Clarendon Bold

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