Berthold Block is a
sans-serif typeface released by the
H. Berthold foundry
A foundry is a factory that produces metal castings. Metals are cast into shapes by melting them into a liquid, pouring the metal into a mold, and removing the mold material after the metal has solidified as it cools. The most common metals pr ...
in the early twentieth century and intended for
display use.
Block has a chunky design suitable for headings, with short
descenders allowing tight linespacing and rounded corners.
It is sometimes simply called "Block". Font design expert Stephen Coles describes it as "a soft but substantial
display face with compact dimensions and an organic appearance…
tisn’t meant for body copy."
The
Klingspor Museum credits it to Hermann Hoffmann, who managed type design for Berthold.
The original metal type release of Block was intentionally "distressed" in style, matching the effect of worn type; some re-releases have a cleaner design. Ferdinand Ulrich suggests that this was to match the organic feel of advertising lettering of the time, including the work of
Lucian Bernhard
Lucian Bernhard (March 15, 1883 – May 29, 1972) was a German graphic designer, type designer, professor, interior designer, and artist during the first half of the twentieth century.
Career
He was influential in helping create the design ...
.
Block was one of Berthold's most popular typefaces, and was released in a wide range of versions, including lighter weights and type in wood (for large sizes).
Metal type versions had
stylistic alternate
In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a " sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design.
In mod ...
characters such as a more compact 'S' to allow fine-tuning of appearance of type and fit the desired number of characters into a line.
History
Berthold Block was released in 1908; Berthold later added additional weights and styles, also releasing
phototypesetting versions.
Berthold also used the name "Block" for a number of other typefaces not particularly closely related to it as a
brand extension marketing strategy. These included the script font "Block-Signal" and the
blackletter Block-Fraktur.
Block continued to be popular in the
phototypesetting period; Jens Gehlhaar comments that "with roughened outlines and in bold weights, it was never a candidate for timelessness, but its big x-height and tight fit made it quite popular in 1970s Germany and England." It was often used by
Praktiker and by the
Whitechapel Art Gallery
The Whitechapel Gallery is a public art gallery in Whitechapel on the north side of Whitechapel High Street, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The original building, designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, opened in 1901 as one of the ...
for branding in the 1970s and 80s.
In the late 1970s, Berthold re-released three lighter-weight fonts derived from the Block design as a mini-family named "Berliner Grotesk" for phototypesetting, with the font redraw carried out by
Erik Spiekermann
Erik Spiekermann (born 30 May 1947 in Stadthagen, Lower Saxony) is a German typographer, designer and writer. He is an honorary professor at the University of the Arts Bremen and ArtCenter College of Design.
Biography
Spiekermann studied art hi ...
.
Digitisations
A variety of digitisations of Block exist, including by Berthold and successor companies and by
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 ...
(the condensed weight only).
Paratype of Moscow released an expansion with Cyrillic characters in 1997.
Matthew Butterick
Matthew Coffin Butterick (born November 15, 1970) is an American typographer, lawyer, writer, and computer programmer. He received the 2012 Golden Pen Award from the Legal Writing Institute for his book ''Typography for Lawyers'', which started ...
's Hermes, first released by
Font Bureau
The Font Bureau, Inc. or Font Bureau is a digital type foundry based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The foundry is one of the leading designers of typefaces, specializing in type designs for magazine and newspaper publishers.
History
...
and later self-released, is a loose adaptation also inspired by other German
grotesque
Since at least the 18th century (in French and German as well as English), grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus ...
typefaces of the period, adding lighter weights and unicase features.
References
{{notelist, 30em
External links
1921 Berthold Block specimen(digitisation: Stephen Coles)
Fonts In Use Sans-serif typefaces
Display typefaces
Berthold typefaces