In 1905, a designer named Eleisha Pechey created a playful serif font called Windsor for the British type foundry Stephenson Blake.
Exactly 70 years later, legendary type designer Ed Benguiat, who has created or redesigned logotypes for The New York Times, Coca-Cola and Ford, would run into Woody Allen at the same New Jersey diner every morning for breakfast. According to the widely circulated anecdote, as reported in a 2007 graphic design blog post, “Allen asked him what a good typeface was. Benguiat had an affinity for Windsor and suggested it to him that morning.” (Another story, that the font was a tribute to Allen’s filmmaking hero Ingmar Bergman, is a misconception. Bergman favored other fonts for his titles, including the Art Deco-inspired Florida, which he used in Persona.)
That was that. Allen used a version called Windsor Light, in white against a black background, for the opening and closing credits sequences of every film he made since 1975’s Love and Death — some 50-odd movies. The typeface became known as “the Woody Allen font” and came to denote a certain brand of urbane, neurotic and intellectually sophisticated filmmaking.
And exactly 50 years after that, a new film unveiled at the Venice Film Festival employed the exact same font in its title sequence — this time causing something of a stir.
The film is Luca Guadagnino‘s After the Hunt. It stars Julia Roberts as a Yale philosophy professor approached by a prized pupil, played by Ayo Edebiri, who confides in her that she was raped by another professor, played by Andrew Garfield, who vigorously denies the claim. Reviews of the film have been tepid, with The Hollywood Reporter calling the whole endeavor “very five years ago” and “punishing.”
Reviews have also made pointed notice of the typeface, however, and the inevitable question about it at the press conference led to this measured response from the director: “The crass answer would be, why not? … [W]e couldn’t stop thinking of Crimes and Misdemeanors, Another Woman or even Hannah and Her Sisters. And there was an infrastructure to the story that felt very linked to the great oeuvre of Woody Allen between 1985 and 1991.”
But he was not done. He could not, after all, dance around the sexual abuse accusations leveled at Allen by his adoptive daughter, Dylan Farrow, who was seven at the time of the alleged abuse. The allegations have followed Allen since the early 1990s, but really took hold in 2014, after a Golden Globe lifetime achievement award presented to the filmmaker led to a backlash and public reexamination of the case.
“I felt it was also sort an interesting nod to thinking of an artist who has been, in a way, facing some sort of problems about his being, and what is our responsibility in looking at the work of an artist that we love, like Woody Allen,” Guadagnino continued. “And, by the way, it’s a classic, that kind of font. I just want to conclude it’s such a classic that it goes beyond Woody Allen.”
That it is. Windsor is in fact a wildly popular font in pop culture and merchandising. It has been employed in sitcom title treatments from All in the Family to Who’s the Boss to The Goldbergs. In the ’70s, Sesame Street frequently dipped into Windsor waters and The Price is Right used it to flash phrases at the opening of the show like “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT.” And it can be seen on countless book covers, some of which are collected on this website, one of multiple typeface blogs that obsessively chronicle its history.
But let’s get real. Guadagnino is pointedly evoking Allen by opening his #MeToo drama with Windsor in white letters on black background. At the same time, he’s also trying to evoke the best of Allen’s oeuvre — which, outside of the accusations, remain essential entries in the American cinematic canon.
In that sense, After the Hunt joins a group of 21st century films and TV shows that have set out to “reclaim” Windsor from Allen (who, it should be noted, is still very much alive and making films, like 2024’s French-language Coup de Chance, which struggled to find distribution but eventually did get a U.S. release. Allen has hinted it could be his last. And yes, it uses Windsor).
Most notably there was FX’s Fleishman is in Trouble, starring Jesse Eisenberg as a divorced New York doctor. The marketing for that 2022 miniseries used a very Allen-esque title treatment. Nothing was mentioned about the font choice in promotion of the show, but critics made frequent note of its “nouveau Woody Allen-ness” in reviews.
The choice to use Windsor here it not quite a reclamation, per se, so much as it as an unavoidable acknowledgment. But also, in an uncomfortable way, it is an attempt at capitalizing on the cachet of Allen’s work — much like Guadagnino cops to.
The 2021 surrogate-pregnancy comedy Together, Together went further, putting the white-on-black Windsor treatment into the film and trailer. In the film, Patti Harrison’s surrogate character Anna says, “I think you’ve watched too many Woody Allen movies,” then goes into a monologue about the inappropriate romantic age-gap dynamics in movies like Allen’s Manhattan.
“I think Woody Allen movies did for romance what internet porn did to sex,” its writer-director Nikole Beckwith told the L.A. Times. “Kind of really created this strange extreme that is this idealized thing, and you think this is how it is. This old. decrepit, nebbishy guy who’s an asshole is going to get these beautiful young women who look to him for approval all the time on everything. And that’s not true.” What better way to criticize Allen, Beckwith seems to be saying, than to reclaim his signature title treatment for her own film?
But that pales in comparison to Windsor’s most withering appearance, in HBO’s poster for the 2021 documentary miniseries Allen v. Farrow (noted here by Cracked.com). Directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, the lacerating expose was declared by the L.A. Times to be the “final nail in the coffin of Woody Allen’s legacy.”
But for now, at least, Windsor Light lives on.