It is also the current font to be used in title cards for film trailers in the US.ĭeveloped for professional use, Gotham is an extremely large family, featuring four widths, eight weights, and separate designs for screen display. The font has also been used as the cornerstone of the One World Trade Center, the tower built on the site of the former World Trade Center in New York. Since creation, Gotham has been highly visible due to its appearance in many notable places, including a large amount of campaign material created for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, and the 2016 federal election campaign of the Australian Labor Party. Gotham has a relatively broad design with a reasonably high x-height and wide apertures. Gotham's letterforms are inspired by a form of architectural signage that achieved popularity in the mid-twentieth century, and are especially popular throughout New York City. While USA Today has called Gotham the font of the decade, it certainly has proven to be a typeface we can believe in.Gotham is a family of widely used geometric sans-serif digital typefaces designed by American type designer Tobias Frere-Jones in 2000. Earlier this year Narrow and Extra Narrow variations were introduced, creating a total of 66 Gotham styles. In 2007, after Print’s exclusivity had passed, the font became available to the general public. First used by the short-lived John Edwards campaign, it was Barack Obama's successful run that made the font more popular than ever.ĭue to its popularity, a Rounded variant was created in 2005-again the result of a commission, this time from the graphic design magazine Print. presidential elections were particularly good for Gotham. Perhaps due to its bold ‘American’ feel, the 2008 U.S. Spreading rapidly, it has been used in newspapers, corporate logos, movie posters, and packaging for brands like Coca-Cola, Netflix, Crest, and countless others. In 2002, GQ’s exclusive license had expired and the typeface was released publicly. I didn't think anything new could have been found there, but luckily for me (and the client), I was mistaken.” From Bus Terminal to Campaign Trail Interestingly, Frere-Jones admits Gotham may never had happened without the GQ commission: “The humanist and the geometric… had already been thoroughly staked out and developed by past designers. As put by Newsweek, “Unlike other sans serif typefaces, it's not German, it's not French, it's not Swiss. This process gave the design a unique quality often missing from geometric faces, while its vintage New York sources distinguish it as a notably American typeface. In drawing Gotham, Frere-Jones used the “mathematical reasoning of a draftsman” (over his instincts as type designer) allowing the letters to escape the grid wherever necessary. Tobias Frere-Jones, from a Helvetica film outtake It was born outside of type design, in some other world and has a very distinct flavor from that. It's the kind of letter an engineer would make. The lettering over the front door is this very plain geometric letter, but its not the type of letter that a type designer would make. And we both noticed the letting on the Port Authority Bus Terminal up on 42nd Street and 8th Avenue. We both grew up in the city and independently we've walked around the streets and earmarked pieces of lettering or signage that we thought would be a good seed, or starting point for a project somewhere down the line. Using the seemingly plain, geometric lettering from New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal as the project’s touchstone, an American “working class” typeface was born. Provided with a brief to create something “masculine, new, and fresh,” type designer Tobias Frere-Jones drew influences from post-war building signage and hand-painted letters seen around New York City. Gotham was born in 2000, when men’s fashion magazine GQ commissioned New York-based Hoefler & Frere-Jones to create a new typeface for use in their publication. Perhaps most well known from the successful Obama ’08 presidential campaign, Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Gotham has been referred to as the typeface of the decade-and it’s the subject of the fourth installment in our ‘Know your type’ series.
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