Bank Gothic is a rectilinear geometric sans-serif

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are list of type ...

designed by Morris Fuller Benton for American Type Founders and released in 1930. The design has become popular from the late twentieth century to suggest a science-fiction, military, corporate, or sports aesthetic. Bank Gothic is an exploration of geometric forms, and is contemporary with the rectilinear slab serif typeface

City A city is a human settlement of notable size.Goodall, B. (1987) ''The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography''. London: Penguin.Kuper, A. and Kuper, J., eds (1996) ''The Social Science Encyclopedia''. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. It can be def ...

Georg Trump Georg Trump (10 July 1896 – 21 December 1985) was a German graphics, typeface and postage stamp designer, known for designs such as the book typeface Trump Mediaeval (1954), the slab serif City ( 1931) and the condensed, industrial Schadow. Trum ...

(Gothic in this context means "sans-serif", at the time a common usage, rather than

blackletter Blackletter (sometimes black letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for the Danish, Norweg ...

). The typeface also bears comparison with late-nineteenth-century engraving faces such as

Copperplate Gothic Copperplate Gothic is a typeface designed by Frederic W. Goudy and released by American Type Founders (ATF) in 1901. While termed a "''Gothic''" (another term for sans-serif), the face has small glyphic serifs that act to emphasize the blunt ...

, which were popular for

business card Business cards are cards bearing business information about a company or individual. They are shared during formal introductions as a convenience and a memory aid. A business card typically includes the giver's name, company or business aff ...

and corporate stationery printing. The design was initially issued in small print sizes to allow this use.

Metal type

The original metal typeface was capitals-only in light, medium and bold in regular and condensed widths, with larger sizes released as Poster Gothic. According to McGrew, the range of sizes cast allowed smaller sizes to be used as small capitals for larger sizes. It became a standard design, with Monotype, Linotype, Ludlow and Intertype offering versions. When Linotype issued a digitization in the 1980s,

small caps In typography, small caps (short for "small capitals") are characters typeset with glyphs that resemble uppercase letters (capitals) but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding lowercase letters or text figures. This is technicall ...

were added in the lower-case position, and this has become common in digital releases.

Digitizations

As American Type Founders ceased operations before issuing a digital version, various digitizations have been released by different companies, including

Bitstream A bitstream (or bit stream), also known as binary sequence, is a sequence of bits. A bytestream is a sequence of bytes. Typically, each byte is an 8-bit quantity, and so the term octet stream is sometimes used interchangeably. An octet may ...

, ParaType (the Bitstream digitization, adding Cyrillic), and others.

Bank Gothic Pro

In 2010, FontHaus released an updated revival of the original Bank Gothic complete with a lowercase and small caps and a new suite of punctuation glyphs. The family consists of light, medium, and bold weights in both a regular and a condensed style. The new lowercase characters did not exist with the original release, and were modeled after many similar Morris Fuller Benton designs released by American Type Founders in the 1930s.

DeLuxe Gothic

In 2003, letterforms artist Michael Doret began work on DeLuxe Gothic—a derivative version of American Type Founder's Bank Gothic. Unlike the 1930s original, Doret’s font contains lowercase characters. The DeLuxe Gothic Family was released in OpenType format in 2010 by Alphabet Soup Type Founders with both regular and condensed styles as well as traditional shortcaps. DeLuxe Gothic was the name originally used by the Intertype Corporation for its version of Morris Fuller Benton's Bank Gothic. Prior to its September 8, 2010 release, it was known as Bank Gothic AS.

Morris Sans

Designed by Dan Reynolds for Linotype, Morris Sans is an extended Bank Gothic family including both lowercase letters and small capitals. The design has three weights in regular and condensed widths, and modern OpenType features.

Squarish Sans CT

Squarish Sans is a typeface under development as of September 2014. It was developed specifically to address the need of open-source software having access to this popular design, and is thus under the terms of the

Open Font License The SIL Open Font License (or OFL in short) is one of the major open font licenses, which allows embedding, or "bundling", of the font in commercially sold products. OFL is a free and open source license. It was created by SIL International, ...

. It follows DeLuxe Gothic and Morris Sans in containing true lowercase characters, as well as

. Squarish Sans offers Greek, Hebrew, and a large number of non-alphabetic (e.g. mathematical) symbols as well.

Others

Elsner+Flake designed two typefaces which are based on the Bank Gothic typeface: Bank Sans EF and Bank Sans Caps EF. Both typefaces had 64 weights (Regular, Semi Condensed, Condensed, Compressed, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold) with italics and support Cyrillic. Matt Desmond designed the Aldrich typeface, influenced from the Bank Gothic typeface. Banque Gothique was designed by Steve Jackaman and published by Red Rooster Collection. Banque Gothique contains 9 styles and family package options and is based on the earliest ATF/M.F. Benton versions of the Bank Gothic typefaces. Orbitron is a geometric sans-serif typeface intended for display purposes. It features four weights (light, medium, bold, and black), a stylistic alternative, small caps, and many alternate glyphs. Orbitron was designed by Matt McInerney as a free alternative to typefaces like Bank Gothic. Orbitron was remastered as a variable font in 2019.

Notes and references

---- *Blackwell, Lewis. ''20th Century Type.'' Yale University Press: 2004. . *Fiedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. ''Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History.'' Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. . *Jaspert, W. Pincus, W. Turner Berry and A.F. Johnson. ''The Encyclopedia of Type Faces.'' Blandford Press Lts.: 1953, 1983. . {{ref end

External links

Fonts in UseSquarish Sans
open-source digitization for use with

Aleph One In mathematics, particularly in set theory, the aleph numbers are a sequence of numbers used to represent the cardinality (or size) of infinite sets that can be well-ordered. They were introduced by the mathematician Georg Cantor and are named ...

American Type Founders typefaces Geometric sans-serif typefaces Incised typefaces Letterpress typefaces Photocomposition typefaces Digital typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1930 Typefaces designed by Morris Fuller Benton