SDES2198 Advanced Typography and Publishing Design

SR1 - GOTHAM

Gotham is a family of geometric sans-serif digital typefaces designed by American type designer Tobias Frere-Jones in 2000.

Tobias Frere-Jones (Born 1970) is one of America’s most prolific type designers who currently works in New York City with Jonathan Hoefler (another prolific American type designer) at their type foundry ‘Hoefler & Frere-Jones’. After graduation from the Rhode Island School of Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts he joined the Font Bureau Inc. in Boston – and would continue to work there for seven years and create a number of the typefaces that Font Bureau is best known for such as Poynter Oldstyle & Gothic.

After leaving the Bureau he became an Art Critic and created his own typefoundry with Hoefler in 1999. Since then he has collaborated on projects with Nike, Pentagram, GQ, Esquire Magazine, The New Times and The New York Times Magazine. He currently has 42 typefaces to his name.

The Gotham typeface was created for GQ Magazine, who editors wanted a sans-serif with a ‘geometric structure’ that would look ‘masculine, new and fresh’ for their magazine. Frere-Jones gained inspiration from time spent walking block-by-block through Manhattan with a camera to find source material, and he based the font on lettering seen on old buildings. "I suppose there's a hidden personal agenda in the design," Frere-Jones said, "to preserve those old pieces of New York that could be wiped out before they're appreciated. Having grown up here, I was always fond of the 'old' New York and its lettering."

Frere-Jones used the mathematical reasoning of an engineer, over his instincts as a type designer, to create Gotham. The typeface is wider than average text, lending it a unique sense of gravity and solidity – and escapes from the graphical grid wherever necessary, ‘giving the design an affability usually missing from common ‘geometric’ faces’. As seen in the picture Goth has a very large x-height compared to other fonts.

Gotham allows a simple and classic message to be conveyed – much like the great modern font ‘Helvetica’ but is more rounded and more architectural.

Over the last decade Gotham has been used everywhere, and most notable in the Obama 2008 presidential campaign and cornerstone of the One World Trade Center.

The International Herald Tribune praised the choice for its "potent, if unspoken, combination of contemporary sophistication (a nod to his suits) with nostalgia for America's past and a sense of duty." John Berry, an author of books on typography, agreed: "It's funny to see it used in a political campaign because on the one hand it's almost too ordinary yet that's the point. It has the sense of trustworthiness because you've seen it everywhere." Graphic designer Brian Collins noted that Gotham was the "linchpin" to Obama's entire campaign imagery.

Other uses;