The Eagle™ font family was created by David Berlow from 1989 to 1994 as a digital version of the 1933 Morris Fuller Benton Eagle Bold™ typeface. The original Eagle Bold was made for the US government as a simpler alternative to the Novel Gothic™ face, which was found too decorative for official use.
Eagle History
When the National Recovery Administration needed a logo at its inception in 1933, The Blue Eagle design made with the Novel Gothic font for the “NRA” was accepted. However, when plans were submitted for further NRA documentation, the Novel Gothic face was found to have too many unusual characteristics. A new, simpler font was needed, so Morris Fuller Benton was commissioned to create it. Benton had previously been the co-designer of Novel Gothic.
The original Eagle Bold font was a popular choice for business and print, and was available until the nineteen-forties. It was of course named after the NRA eagle and cast in sizes from 18pt to 96pt.
In 1989, the noted type designer David Berlow revitalized the Eagle Bold typeface, adding a set of lowercase letters as well as expanding the character map in other ways. The new Eagle face was released by the Font Bureau (of whom Berlow was a co-founder) in 1990. The bold sans serif font has been adopted by a large number of designers as a basis for logo design and is commonly used in print because of its suitability for titles and short amounts of headline text.
References
The Font Bureau: Eagle
Identifont: Eagle
Identifont: Eagle Bold
Monotype Imaging: Novel Gothic
The Font Bureau: David Berlow
Identifont: David Berlow
Eagle Usage
Because of its heavy, vivid character, Eagle is suitable for a number of different applications, especially situations in which very pronounced type is required. Over the years since their initial creation, both Eagle Bold and Eagle have proven very popular in the creation of logotype.
Examples of the aforementioned logo design property include The Onion newspaper, a satirical publication available both online and in tangible print. The full Cartoon Network logo also makes use of the Eagle font, as does the Sacramento Valley based Five Star Bank.
Media Coverage
The NRA (National Recovery Administration) was created in 1933 as a New Deal initiative by US president Franklin D. Roosevelt. The economic situation in America was in need of revitalization - having recently survived the devastating Wall Street stock market crash – so the NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act) was established to attempt this. The NRA was an offshoot designed to establish “fair competition,” eliminate “destructive competition,” set minimum wages and minimum product prices, as well as maximum weekly hours.
In 1935, the NRA was disbanded after its parent organization, the NIRA, was deemed unconstitutional. However the National Labor Relations Act, which passed later that year restored many of the aspects of the NRA, which went on to form the backbone of union policy for decades afterward.
