Trade Gothic was designed by Jackson Burke between 1948 and 1960 for Linotype. In the nineteenth-century grotesque style, like News Gothic, Trade Gothic has a large x-height.

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The standard American sanserif of the first two thirds of the twentieth century, prepared for ATF by Morris Fuller Benton in 1908 under the name News Gothic, with a matching lightface known as Lightline Gothic. Linotype’s Trade Gothic follows News Gothic except for its widely-spaced straight-sided boldface based on ATF Alternate Gothic No.3. Linotype matches News Gothic Bold, a boldface version that originated at Intertype, with Trade Gothic Bold No.2. Ludlow Record Gothic follows News Gothic more loosely.

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Based on character shapes with origins rooted in the work of 19th Century American wood type makers, DST Mechanic Gothic draws influence from the poster types found in the impactful advertising during the Industrial revolution.

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News Gothic was the standard American sanserif of the first two thirds of the twentieth century with narrow proportions and a large x-height.

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Sweet Gothic is a 2009 addition to the Sweet Collection of engraved lettering styles from the 20th Century. 

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Sheridan Gothic, also known as Grant Antique, is a quaint design produced in the late nineteenth century.

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The classical nineteenth century engravers’ form, with corners sharpened with a flick of the burin. F.W. Goudy captured the design as a typographic series for ATF in 1901.

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Distinctively Art Nouveau with a touch of Arts & Crafts, Quaint Gothic is a typographic gem from the late nineteenth century. Also known as Desdemona, this undulating and organic typeface is a versatile and refreshing alternative to many of the font designs on the market today. Quaint Gothic comes complete with an alternate set of caps and a new set of lowercase characters. And for your convenience, a nifty set of small caps and small figures are included in this version. You may also want to access the word-on-a-wave logotypes like “to” and “and” located in the special character slots. They’re great for constructing provocative headlines and titles.

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The family tree of this friendly face runs deep. Its primary inspiration is Twentieth Century, designed by Saul Hess as a monoline version of Paul Renner’s Futura.

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A set of three condensed sanserifs prepared for ATF as text and titling by Morris Fuller Benton in 1903 and popular for the next half century.

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Gothic 13 is a bold condensed sans serif typeface. Originally designed in small sizes, Gothic 13 is very similar to Modern Gothic Condensed, which was a turn-of-the-century modernization of a popular nineteenth century style.

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A revival of an unusual wooden type font of the 19th century, a sans serif, suitable for display.

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A revival of one of the popular sans serif wooden type fonts of the 19th century, narrow, short ascenders and descenders.

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Trump Gothic is a revival and expansion of two different takes on Signum, Georg Trump’s popular mid-twentieth-century condensed gothic.

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Based on a revival of one of the popular wooden type fonts of the 19th century, suitable for display, or text.

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A dark, condensed, nineteenth century sanserif made popular by Linotype, the capitals deriving from Barnhart Brothers and Spindler, the lowercase from Farmer.

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A revival of one of the popular wooden type fonts of the 19th century, a very useful design for display.

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An original design, loosely based on a typeface from an old wood type specimen book from the turn-of-the-century.

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A revival of one of the popular wooden type fonts of the 19th century, a very useful design for display, or text, somewhat geometric in form, a bit narrow.

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A revival of one of the popular wooden type fonts of the 19th century, a very useful design for display, lowercase missing, very narrow, unusual splayed serifs at top and bottom of strokes.

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Based on a revival of one of the popular wooden type fonts of the 19th century, suitable for display, lower case missing but not always designed for this type of face.

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A revival of one of the popular sans serif wooden type fonts of the 19th century, narrow, rounded strokes at top and bottom, pointed horizontal devices in centers, no lower case designed.

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Reminicent of mid-19th century antique type and Victorian cast-iron signage, Coldharbour Gothic lovingly preserves all the eroded and rusted textures in digital form.

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Sweet Gothic Serif is a 2009 addition to the Sweet Collection of engraved lettering styles from the 20th Century. It is a serif variant of Sweet Gothic.

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Silverland is a revival of an old type font from the Bruce Type Foundry of New York, the original font included uppercase only plus 22 end caps. This 21st. century version has been expanded to include many more decorative end caps plus new lowercase, small caps, italic, italic small caps, swash, swash small caps and gothic version. Approximately six months of painstaking work has gone into making this font family over the last twenty two months.

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Stuttgart Gothic is based on early 20th century hand lettering samples developed by Ernst Schneidler at the Stuttgart School of Design.

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A font by Christian Acker (2003), based upon the practice of the Americana folk art tradition of tattoo design. Throughout the late 19th and 20th Centuries sailors would popularize and spread motifs, designs and styles by carrying this art around the world on their sleeves. A family of four fonts representing traditional styles is now available as a digital font. An accompanying collection of over 60 eps illustrations of tattoo “flash” are also available at cubanica.com.

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Gothic Tuscan One is a all-cap condensed gothic with round terminals and decorative “tuscan” center spurs. It was first shown by William H. Page of Norwich, Connecticut among his wood type specimen pages of 1859. Gothic Tuscan One exemplifies the strength of decorative wood types: large, simple type forms that provide the visual boldness sought by advertisers of the Victorian period. While our marketing has gotten so very sophisticated, there is always a place for simple, visually strong typeface.

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A revival of one of the popular wooden type fonts of the 19th century, suitable for display.

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For Monumental Gothic, we delved into the archives and found some old rubbings and photos of monumental brasses from British tombs of the 12th and 13th centuries.

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Like a bright star shimmering on a still and quiet summer night, Arched Gothic Condensed is a glowing example of Victorian type. Thin in the middle with clumpy wedges on top and bottom, it truly bears the spirit of a bygone era.

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At the turn of the 20th century monolinear alphabets were often despised for their dullness. Typographers, therefore, took great pains to breathe some kind of individuality into the monotonous sans-serif scheme. They started with subtle differentiation in the thickness of vertical and horizontal strokes and finished by improving details.

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In 1903 faced with the welter of sans offered by ATF, Morris Fuller Benton designed News Gothic, a 20th Century standard.

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Balboa is a sans serif display typeface. It incorporates elements of various primitive gothic and sans serif letterforms from the early 19th century and combines them with contemporary touches to make a distinctive modern design.

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Living in the 21^st century has its drawbacks. Just when you thought you were finally living in the future, a client who isn’t quite with it wants packaging design or merchandising to match their old-school material from the 20^th century. Geared to fill such anachronistic holes, Meloche mimics the style and feel of grotesk sans serif classics from yesteryear. The typographic ideal passed down from the 18^th century was never more generic, with semi-condensed forms, even width capitals, middle-of-the-road line contrast and curled-in stroke ends. Meloche covers a likely range of uses with regular, semi-bold and bold weights. Upper and lower case with numerals, punctuation and accents and a selection of monetary symbols.

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Fakir is a Hindu ascetic or religious mendicant, especially one who performs feats of magic or endurance. The well known feats performed by them include sitting steadily on a bed of nails and walking on burning coals.

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Futura is the fully developed prototype of the twentieth century Geometric Sanserif.

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Stratum is a family of typefaces built from a synthesis of contemporary and historical sources. The austere geometry of early 20th century display faces paired with a desire for a contemporary lowercase have merged to produce this family of six weights.

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Brown Gothic is a compact sans serif face, with rounder letterforms than the usual condensed grotesques such as Helvetica, Univers, et al.

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Inspired by Goudy’s original from 1905, Biondi maintains the classic wide and squarish shape that made Copperplate Gothic a design staple and moves it forward to the 21^st Century.

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Domyouji was designed as a high-tech body copy companion to Korataki. With a nod to Handel Gothic, Domyouji brings the square-sans into the 21st Century.

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Take a trip down the interstate with Turnpike, an extra wide 1960s style modern gothic font inspired by classic dashboard lettering.

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An inline gothic display font based in mid-twentieth century showcard and signpainting styles. All caps with some alternates in lower case keyboard positions.

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An inline gothic display font based in mid-twentieth century showcard and signpainting styles. All caps with some alternates in lower case keyboard positions.

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An inline gothic display font based in mid-twentieth century showcard and signpainting styles. All caps with some alternates in lower case keyboard positions.

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Philip Bouwsma returns with his yet another great manifestation of historical calligraphy.

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The object of Grover was to join two distinctive typeface designs: the basic European gothic of the late nineteenth century and the ‘rounded’ style found in 1960s America.

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Bougainville was inspired by many of my favorites and has been on the drawing board in excess of ten years. Only this year I decided to expand the original 1994 design to include other weight variants.

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A revival of one of the popular wooden type fonts of the 19th century, condensed, bold, a very useful design for display.

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The Neubank family builds on the firm foundation of Bank Gothic, a twentieth-century classic designed by Morris Fuller Benton for ATF, and adds a fluid, dynamic lowercase that makes it right at home in the twenty-first century.

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Silverland is a revival of an old type font from the Bruce Type Foundry of New York, the original font included uppercase only plus 22 end caps. This 21st. century version has been expanded to include many more decorative end caps plus new lowercase, small caps, italic, italic small caps, swash, swash small caps and gothic version. Approximately six months of painstaking work has gone into making this font family over the last twenty two months.

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Melusine is based on an ornate style of gothic calligraphy used primarily in decorative signs and advertising in Germany around the turn of the century.

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Calligraphers of the Italian Renaissance adapted ancient models to create “italic” and “roman”, a consciously dramatic departure from standard Church Gothic.

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A Roman-Gothic hybrid with an antique feel, based on pen-drawn forms. The stylishness of individual letters makes it appealing even for large-scale signage, where evoking heritage is important.

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By no means a cheap spinoff of a great original, the Copper Penny family is a completely revamped tribute to Frederic W. Goudy’s venerable Copperplate Gothic. After much attention and care, this freshened-up face takes a century-overdue leap forward, anxious to take on the needs of an ever-changing design world. Even as it serves a dual role in Computer Aided Signmaking (CAS) and Desktop Publishing (DTP), this family is also brimming with an extensive range of alternates, plus a set of small uppercase characters for that traditional look, and lastly and most welcome, a viable lowercase that pays clear homage to its classic roots.

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William Morris wanted a gothic type drawn from the 14th century blackletter tradition that he admired both stylistically and philosophically. He drew from several sources. His principal inspiration for his lower case was the 1462 Bible by Peter Schoeffer of Mainz; particularly notable for the first appearance of the ‘ear’ on the g. The upper case was Morris’s amalgam of the Italian cursive closed caps popular throughout the 12th through 15th centuries, a modern example of which is Goudy’s Lombardic Capitals. The gothic that Morris designed was first used by his Kelmscott Press for the publication of the Historyes Of Troye in 1892. It was called “Troy Type” and was cut at 18 points by Edward Prince. It was also used for The Tale of Beowulf. The typeface was re-cut in at 12 points and called “Chaucer Type” for use in The Order of Chivalry and The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Morris' objective is designing his gothic was to preserve the color and presence of his sources, but to create letters that were more readable to the English eye. ATF copied Troy and called it Satanick. Not only was the ATF version popular in the United States; but, interestingly, sold very well in Germany. There was great interest in that country in finding a middle ground between blackletter and roman styles -- one that was comfortable for a wider readership. The Morris design was considered one of the more successful solutions.

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16th and 17th century formal handwriting forms the basis for Tinderbox, an antique script.

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Poplar is an Adobe Originals typeface designed by Barbara Lind in 1990 for the Adobe Wood Type series.

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Pontifica is based on ‘protogothic’ calligraphy, a style developed at the monestery of St. Gall in the 12th century to replace Carolingian minuscule with a more efficient and compact system of lettering.

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This face is a bit of a time traveler. It combines the lowercase from a font called simply Square Gothic from the 1888 James Conner’s Sons specimen book with the uppercase of Morris Fuller Benton’s 1932 monocase masterwork Agency Gothic, resulting in a high-tech typeface right at home in the twenty-first Century.

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The object of Grover was to join two distinctive typeface designs: the basic European gothic of the late nineteenth century and the ‘rounded’ style found in 1960s America.

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Two typefaces from the 1923 Barnhart Brothers & Spindler specimen book have been combined to produce this gem. Swagger Capitals, designed by Carl S. Junge, for the uppercase and Gothic Novelty Title for the lowercase.

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Montara is a design by Jim Parkinson, inspired by “Gothic” (sans-serif) showcard lettering.

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An elegantly refined typeface with a subtle wedge serif, the character shapes of Acolyte STF set a rhythm of light and dark like windows in a cathedral.

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One of the Modulus series of interchangeable type styles built around a common framework. A general purpose design with squared forms and a simplified finish, Primex delivers excellent clarity on-screen and is doubly effective in print. The key features are its simple utility and unremarkable appearance. Where most fonts exert their individuality, Primex prefers to remain anonymous. The compact proportions closely follow Alternate Gothic*, one of the 20th century’s most ubiquitous and versatile types. In style Primex is patterned after countless squared grotesks and linears; industrial in essence with contemporary twists, a robust work-a-day typeface totally subservient to the message. Primex is suitable for anything from text to sub-headings, incidental text, main headings, logos, display, signage and poster work, and extends this range with high readability on-screen thanks to its simple right-angled construction. A companion oblique font is included with the base font at no cost.

• one weight fits all
• extra-condensed for maximum cramability
• high performance in low resolution media

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Lionheart is the digitization and expansion of Saladin, a neo-gothic typeface designed by Friedrich Poppl, long after he established himself as one of the greatest German designers of all time with some of the most “ausgezeichnet” scripts and text faces to ever come out of Europe. This typeface, though lesser-known among Poppl’s other masterpieces, was one of the first in its genre to abandon blackletter influence and attempt letter variations based strictly on Roman alphabet shapes. Poppl’s idea spawned a whole generation of neo-gothics that can now be found on many a movie poster or book cover where the design must hint at secrets and dark sides.

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Blackletter typefaces follow certain fixed rules, both in respect to their forms and to the orthography. Possibly, they were a reaction to the half-developed Carolingian minuscule which was soon to end in the Latin script. Narrow, ordered script was to replace the round, hesitant and shattered shapes of letters in order to simplify writing, to unify the meaning of individual letters, and to save some parchment, too. Opposed to the practice common in monasterial scriptoriums where Uncial, Irish and Carolingian inspiration flew freely and as a result, the styles of writing differed in each monastery, the blackletter type was to define one, common standard. It was to express spiritual verticality, in perfect tune with the architecture of the Gothic era. Typography became an integral part of the overall style of the period. The pointed arch and the blackletter type were the vanguard of the spectacular transformation from the Middle Ages towards the modern era, they were a celebration of a time when works of art were not signed by their makers yet.

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Quill-formed roman/gothic with an olde-worlde flavor.

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Almost a half of a millennium after being mistaken for the original 4th century Gothic alphabet and falsely labeled “barbaric” by the European Renaissance, the blackletter alphabet was still flourishing exclusively in early 20th century Germany, not only as an ode to Gutenberg and the country’s rich printing history, but also as a continuous evolution, taking on new shapes and textures influenced by almost every other form of alphabet available. Blackletter would continue to go strong in Germany until just before the second World War, when it died a political death at the height of its hybridization. For almost 50 years after the war, blackletter was very rarely used in a prominent manner, but it continued to be seen sparely in a variety of settings, almost as a subliminal reminder of western civilization’s first printed letters; on certificates and official documents of all kinds, religious publications, holiday cards and posters, to name a few. In the early 21st century, blackletter type has been appearing sporadically on visible media, but as of late 2005, it is not known how long the renewed interest will last, or even whether or not it will catch on at all.

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The original Jessen typeface, named in reminiscence of the great supporter of the printing art at the end of the 19th century, Peter Jessen, was designed in the years of 1924 until 1930. This “Bible Gothic” was created by the famous German designer Rudolf Koch.

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Alt-Gotisch Verzierte is a typeface of decorative initials that is Victorian in style and bears a close family resemblance to the many ornamental tuscans cut throughout the nineteenth century by British foundries. Instead of the bifurcated terminals of the archetypical tuscan (see Figgins Tuscan by HiH or Stereopticon by Dan X. Solo), these letters display what Nicolete Gray might call a “wedge and bite” design -- as if they started with the wedge serif of a latin form and someone came along and took a perfectly round bite out of the wedge. We need not dwell on the lack of teeth marks. The calligraphic curls and flourishes are often graceful, sometimes a bit contrived, but always complex. There is a busyness that marks the style of the period. If you ever see an old photograph of a well-appointed Victorian parlor, you will recognize that same quality of busyness. Overdone is a word that frequently comes to mind.

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Plagwitz is the name of the part of Leipzig where the Werkstätten and Museum für Buchkunst are to be found, which, in September 2000, hosted the ATypI Congress. During the lecture on Black Letter type faces, a lovely quotation from Bismarck could be heard: “I never read German books set in Roman type.” These circumstances gave me the idea that it would be nice to create some distinctive Black Letter type face. The best Black Letter type faces we know date from the Gothic period, when books were copied by hand, with the use of a bevelled quill. Our alphabet still takes into account Neo-Classical influences when decorative ascenders of upper case letters were added. In 19th-century typography, such Black Letter type faces were frequently complemented with Didot-type Roman faces and steel-engraver’s scripts. I, too, would recommend to combine Plagwitz-Gotisch with type faces like, for example, Hercules, Genre, Excelsor Script and Splendid Quartett.

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The Brass Family has a lineage that extends into English history. About five hundred years ago a devout, but anonymous Englishman gave glory to the God he worshipped by designing the capital letters and decorations of these two fonts. Originally recorded in The History Of Mediaeval Alphabets And Devices by Henry Shaw (London 1853), they are described by Alexander Nesbitt in his Decorative Alphabets And Initials (Mineola, NY 1959) as “Initials and stop ornaments from brasses in Westminster Abbey.” I wish I could say I remember seeing them when I was there, but that was forty-two years ago and all I remember was seeing the tomb of Edward the Confessor.

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Rhodaelian Retour expands the original Rhodaelian into a powerful, feature-packed display typography system.

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Alternate Gothic was designed by Morris Fuller Benton for American Typefounders Company in 1903.

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Aptifer Sans and Aptifer Slab are two 21st century typeface families created by Mårten Thavenius. Each family has seven weights, in roman and italic respectively, making 28 font styles in total.

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This font is one of the most used broken letter fonts today. Fette Fraktur is used to invoke a nostalgic or rustic feeling and found often on restaurants with ‘hearty homemade food’ or breweries who use the ‘good old recipes’ of the founder. The font was designed in the 19th century and from the beginning intended as an advertisement typeface. The lower case letters have a gothic character with only the ornamental flourishes making them broken letters, while the capital letters are more characteristic of broken letter typefaces. One could say Fette Fraktur is a true mix of styles, not unusual for typefaces created at the turn of the 19th century.

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Montara is a design by Jim Parkinson, inspired by “Gothic” (sans-serif) showcard lettering. This kind of lettering was typically done with a flat brush, by American sign painters in the first half of the twentieth century. Montara captures the spirit and vitality of this style while adding many contemporary touches. The Bold Initials represent a modern take on a style of inline letters used by some of these same sign painters.

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Fette Gotisch font is an interpretation of Gothic scripts in the style of the 19th century. During this time, the individualistics handwritings of the past were used to create and define new broken letter forms. This style has heavily influenced the designs of the majority of today’s broken letter fonts. The strong appearance of Fette Gotisch made it popular as a typeface for emphasizing text.

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Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch appeared in 1925 with the Klingspor font foundry in Offenbach, Germany. Designer Rudolf Koch based his work on the Gothic forms of the 14th century and his broken letter font is often seen in advertisements. However, the ornamental letters do not match today’s legibility standards and Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch is therefore recommended for use in headlines and short texts with a point size of 12 or larger.

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Codex was designed by Georg Trump and introduced by the font foundry C.E. Weber in 1954. Based on the German Gothic script of the 13th century, this font has the character of handwriting. Its capital letters are extremely big in comparison with the lower case, hence good for contrast in short text, however, this characteristic makes the font better suited to languages which use fewer capital letters.

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Grace was designed by Elisabeth Megnet and appeared with Linotype in 1992. The font is a part of the package “Calligraphy for Print”, which also contains Ruling Script and Wiesbaden Swing. “Calligraphy for Print 2” completes the set. These packages offer modern calligraphy fonts particularly well-suited to use in posters, magazines and advertisements. The basic style of Grace is based on the Gothic miniscule of the 13th century. It represents a modern philosophy held by Andre Guertler, Professor of Typography in Basel with whom Megnet once studied. With this philosophy, calligraphy is not to be seen as a decorative art, and fonts created according to this tenet have far fewer ornamental strokes. They are eccentric, drawn out and almost bulky. Like Gothic forms, one of the predecessors of this font, Grace gives vertical lines a particular emphasis. This font is not meant for long texts but makes a distinctive impression in shorter texts or headlines.

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Aptifer Sans and Aptifer Slab are two 21st century typeface families created by Mårten Thavenius. Each family has seven weights, in roman and italic respectively, making 28 font styles in total.

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Bernhardt Standard, which was designed in 2003 by Julius de Goede, is a flowing Bastarde script. Bastarde is one of the sub-categories of Blackletter typefaces. The term Blackletter refers to typefaces that have evolved out of Northern Europe’s medieval manuscript tradition. Often called gothic, or Old English, these letters are identifiable by the traces of the wide-nibbed pen stroke within their forms. Of all of the various sorts of Blackletter styles, Bastarde scripts are the most flowing, or Italic. The first Bastarde typefaces, cut in the late 1400s, were based on French handwriting styles, especially those styles popular in Burgundy.

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Morris Fuller Benton, the principal designer of the American Type Founders, designed Mariage in 1901. Mariage, which has been sold under a plethora of different names during the last century, is a blackletter typeface belonging to the Old English category. The term blackletter refers to typefaces that stem out of the historical printing traditions of northern Europe. These letters, called gebrochene Schriften, or “broken type” in German, are normally elaborately bent and distorted. Their forms often print large amounts of ink upon the page, creating text that leaves a heavy, black impression. The Old English style is a subset of blackletter type that dates back to 1498, when Wynken de Worde introduced textura style printing to England. Continental printers had been printing with textura style letters since Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press fifty years earlier. Italian printers stopped using them around 1470. For northern Europeans, texturas remained the most popular form of typeface design until the invention of the fraktur style in Nuremberg.
Mariage is heavily classicized sort of Old English type. During the Victorian era, designers admired the Middle Ages for its chivalric, community-based values and its pre-industrial lifestyle. Yet they also found the basic medieval textura letterform too difficult to read by present standards. They desired to modernize this old style. Today, this sort of update is often referred to not as “modernization” but as classicism.

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