Freehouse is a reinterpretation of the well-remembered Watney’s logo, a brewery and pub chain infamous for its poor quality beer and brutalist decor. In Design Research Unit’s corporate guidelines from 1966 the font is described as Clarendon Bold Expanded — however, this is not the case. Clarendon has square serifs, whereas the Watney’s font is rounder and friendlier. A fixture of the Britsh high street landscape for decades, this digitisation adds a full international character set, numbers, punctuation and many other characters that did not exist in the original. A distressed version that evokes rough print on a wet beermat has also been developed.
