While seeking inspiration, Frere-Jones recalled the lettering he’d photographed on a 1930s New York City Port Authority building sign. The story of Gotham began in 2000 when Tobias Frere-Jones, a designer at the type foundry Hoefler & Co., was commissioned to create a new sans-serif typeface for GQ magazine. Gotham, one of the most popular typefaces of the 21st century, owes its existence to a humble beginning: the lettering on a building sign. It’s always best practice to view a typeface first before committing to purchasing it or downloading the font for free. Gotham Font Previewīefore you hit the download button, let’s just have a look at the font in it’s entirety. It has also gained in worldwide appeal because of its use in many campaigns and especially in Obama’s hope campaign. Gotham is also popular due to being included in the adobe and font generator function. Gotham font is popular mainly use to the great broad design with wide apertures and normal high x-height, which makes it so versatile as a typeface. The structure of this typeface was heavily inspired by the designs of architectural signage of the mid-twentieth century. It is known to be the geometric sans-serif typeface family. Gotham font was designed by American designer Tobias Frere Jones back in 2000. It’s a stylish and versatile font that can be used for many different purposes. Many graphic and web designers have this as their go to font for a wide range of projects. Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2010.Gotham font is one of the most popular fonts in the world. Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers & Editors. (font designers Jonathan Hoefler, Tobias Frere-Jones), Hearst Magazines, a Division of the Hearst Corporation, 12/2005,, 02/12/20. “Typeface Persona: Investigating Gotham’s Suitability for Obama’s 2008 Presidential Campaign”, Evolution of a font. This typeface still remains one of the most commonly used of all typefaces because it possesses a timelessness and exudes personality, honesty, and friendliness, even when it is not associated with Obama.Īhmed. Gotham is now recognizable to many and because of the success of Obama and his campaign. Ahmed explains that the typeface is “American, contemporary, sophisticated, elegant, tasteful, and straightforward” (4).Įn./wiki/Barack_Obama_2008_presidential_primary_campaign Gotham embodies the middle class, which is primarily the demographic many political leaders in the United States cater to. She says “the goal is to find an appropriate match between a style of letters and the specific social situation” (32).

Ellen Lupton in her book, Thinking with Type, categorized Gotham as “Blue-Collar Curves,” saying that graphic designers have to keep in mind the history of typefaces, connotations, and qualities. The typeface, Requiem was “used for Obama and Joe Biden’s names and the year ‘08’”, while Gotham was seen in the “supporting text” in the visuals (Ahmed, 3-4). The “color, form, iconography, scenery, staging, lighting, pose and production” were all designed to enhance the message of the typeface, also to be recognizable and associated with Obama and his words (Ahmed, 3). The campaign Design Director, Scott Thomas, understood the power of visual strategies and designed the visuals knowing they would be as important as the speeches Obama gave (Ahmed, 3). They set out to create a typeface that is timeless, has authority, “straightforward and non-negotiable, yet possessed of great personality,” honest, and friendly (Ahmed, 10).

Hoefler and Frere-Jones said they wanted to create “handmade sans serifs…that transcends both the characteristics of their mannerisms of their craftsmen ”(Ahmed, 10). It is now used “by Saturday Night Live, the University of Waterloo, New York University”, and can be seen in many other places (Ahmed, 8). They created the typeface after looking at the letterforms used in bus terminals in New York City, but it was not until Obama used the typeface for his campaign, that it gained popularity (Ahmed, 6). It was commissioned by GQ magazine to be used on the magazine covers. Gotham was created in 2000 by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, who are the founders of Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Soon bold and slender weights of this type could be found everywhere in newspaper headlines, on posters and brochures. This new typeface caught on quickly and began to appear all over Europe and the U.S, under the names “Grotesque” and “San Serif”. “The first sans serif font to appear in a type sample book was by William Caslon IV in 1816. From the Linetype essay by Adrian Frutiger. With minimal contrast and even widths, Geometric typefaces have a cohesive, but contemporary feel. Influenced by Bauhaus designers in the early 20th century, Geometric Sans typefaces are sans serif fonts derived from simple geometric shapes – circles, triangles and rectangles.

Gotham typeface design