Gotham

 

theoutline.com

What is he writing about today?  Batman?  New York City?

Not quite.  The topic is much more mundane and in line with the Seinfedian “blog about nothing” description I have used for this blog.

Gotham is a font.  Yes, a font. 

In 8^th grade, at my mother’s suggestion, I took a typing class.  We used manual typewriters for the most part.  There were a few sleek, state of the art, IBM Selectrics that we waited our turn to use.  Instead of a carriage that moved the paper with each key stroke and strike of a typebar, the very cool Selectric had a ball with the all the letters and symbols on it.  The ball would move across the paper twisting and striking the paper.  It was almost impossible to jam the Selectric the way the typebars could easily jam on all other typewriters.  An astonishing feature was that you could actually change the ball and have different fonts.  That was a great innovation and feature back then.

In reading about this now, there were many fonts available for typewriters.  The most common was Courier. I was thinking that Elite and Pica were fonts, but the terms referred to the letters per square inch.  Elite was a 12 letter per inch typeface whereas Pica was 10.

With the advent of personal computers and word processing software, the number of fonts available to the average user increased dramatically.  I was amazed by the variety and sizes available, even though I used essentially three almost 100% of the time.

My own favorite has evolved as Microsoft’s Office Suite has evolved.  At first, I used whatever the default was in Microsoft Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint.  At some time in the 1990s, I started playing around with fonts and settled on Helvetica.  I loved the sound of it.  Even better, I liked the look of it.  I used Helvetica for a number of years.

But with updates to Microsoft Office, I noticed Ariel.  Perhaps frivolously because my daughter’s favorite movie ever was The Little Mermaid, I tried Ariel and liked it.  It was the default MS Word font and, honestly, I could not tell the difference between the it and Helvetica.  I would alternate between Ariel and Ariel Narrow for about twice as long as I used Helvetica.

 

With another update, the default font in MS Office became Calibri.  I kept overriding the default and sticking with Ariel and Ariel Narrow.  But with the passing of time, I started using Calibri… again exclusively.

So, why write about Gotham?

I had never even heard of it until I read a blog, How This One Font Took Over the World, by Rachel Hawley.  And, I was equally unaware of its popularity.  I was in the dark about simply because Gotham is not in the list of fonts available in MS Office.

The font was created in 2000 for Gentlemen’s Quarterly.  Per Hawley:

 

Gotham is everywhere, as the name of one of the Tumblr accounts dedicated to tracking its prevalence suggests, but how did it become so ubiquitous? How does a typeface take over so thoroughly in such a short period of time — and what do advertisers across every industry like so much about it?

 

The simplest answers are the technical ones. Gotham is a geometric sans serif — sans serif meaning it lacks the little feet in the corners of letters you’d see in a typeface like Times New Roman, and geometric alluding to the influence of basic shapes in its design. It has a high x-height, meaning that lowercase letters like x and e are comparably large, and its different weights — bold, thin, medium, et cetera — are very distinct from one another. All of this is to say that Gotham can be easily read from a distance on a billboard or sign, making it a natural choice for print advertising.

The list of businesses and political campaigns that use it is impressive.  From Saturday Night Live to Spotify, from the Obama Presidential Campaign (HOPE) to The Tribeca Film Festival.  It is a minimalist easy to read font.  But, it is not available in Microsoft Office.  A google search to determine what freely available font in the Office Suite is closest came up empty.  

 

 

     Everything about fonts has to do with readability.  Fonts are either monospaced (every character takes up the same amount of space) or proportional (the widths of the characters vary).  Courier is the only monospaced font discussed in this piece.  All the other fonts discussed here are proportional in the letters of the alphabet but monospaced for numbers making both easier to read. 

Another classification of font is if they are serifed and sans-serif.  A serif is “any of the short lines stemming from and at an angle to the upper and lower ends of the strokes of a letter” per merriam-webster.com.  Times New Roman and Courier are the only serifed font, the remaining are without or “sans” serif.  Most everyone agrees it is easier to read text in a proportional font.  Venerable newspapers (Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Times – the UK paper for which Times New
Roman was created in 1931) use serifed fonts because they believe they are easier to read.  The creators of all the sans-serif fonts believe their fonts are read.  Where do I stand?  The smaller the font size, I believe a serifed font is easier to read.  The larger the font size favors the sans-serif fonts.

I think fonts are like fashion.  A style may become immensely popular and then, at some point, everyone tires of it and wants something different.  Right now, Gotham may indeed be everywhere… until something else replaces it.

 

Note:  The typeface I use in this blog is Verdana because I think it is more readable.  All the font graphics are from Wikipedia.