Morris Fuller Benton
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Morris Fuller Benton (November 30, 1872 – June 30, 1948) was an American
typeface designer Type design is the art and process of designing typefaces. This involves drawing each letterform using a consistent style. The basic concepts and design variables are described below. A typeface differs from other modes of graphic production su ...
who headed the design department of the
American Type Founders American Type Founders (ATF) Co. was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States. De Vinne, Theodore Low, ''The Practice of Typography,'' Century Com ...
(ATF), for which he was the chief type designer from 1900 to 1937. Many of Benton's designs, such as his large family of related
sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...
or "gothic" typefaces, including
Alternate Gothic Franklin Gothic and its related faces are a large family of sans-serif typefaces in the industrial or grotesque style developed in the early years of the 20th century by the type foundry American Type Founders (ATF) and credited to its head des ...
,
Franklin Gothic Franklin Gothic and its related faces are a large family of sans-serif typefaces in the industrial or grotesque style developed in the early years of the 20th century by the type foundry American Type Founders (ATF) and credited to its head desi ...
, and
News Gothic News Gothic is a sans-serif typeface in the grotesque or industrial style. It was designed by Morris Fuller Benton and released in 1908 by his employer American Type Founders (ATF). News Gothic is similar in proportion and structure to Franklin ...
, are still in everyday use.


Typefaces

Benton is credited as America's most prolific designer of metal type, having (with his team) completed 221
typefaces 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 thousands o ...
, including revivals of historical models, like
Bodoni Bodoni is the name given to the serif typefaces first designed by Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813) in the late eighteenth century and frequently revived since. Bodoni's typefaces are classified as Didone or modern. Bodoni followed the ideas o ...
and
Cloister A cloister (from Latin ''claustrum'', "enclosure") is a covered walk, open gallery, or open arcade running along the walls of buildings and forming a quadrangle or garth. The attachment of a cloister to a cathedral or church, commonly against a ...
; original designs, such as Hobo, Bank Gothic, and
Broadway Broadway may refer to: Theatre * Broadway Theatre (disambiguation) * Broadway theatre, theatrical productions in professional theatres near Broadway, Manhattan, New York City, U.S. ** Broadway (Manhattan), the street **Broadway Theatre (53rd Stree ...
; and adding new weights to existing faces, such as
Century A century is a period of 100 years. Centuries are numbered ordinally in English and many other languages. The word ''century'' comes from the Latin ''centum'', meaning ''one hundred''. ''Century'' is sometimes abbreviated as c. A centennial or ...
,
Goudy Old Style Goudy Old Style (also known as just Goudy) is an old-style serif typeface originally created by Frederic W. Goudy for American Type Founders (ATF) in 1915. Suitable for text and display applications, Goudy Old Style matches the historicist tren ...
and Cheltenham. Although he did not invent the concept, Benton working at ATF pioneered the concept of families of typeface designs, allowing consistency of appearance in different sizes, widths and weights. This allowed ATF to capitalise on a successful typeface's popularity and facilitated coherent layout and graphic design; its 1923 specimen book described its approach of creating families which could allow advertisers to "talk at command with varying emphasis and orchestral power ather than usinga medley of display types." Benton worked as the team leader of designers responsible for creating a basic design and then adapting it to different sizes and weights. He considered his work as a designer important and wrote a brief list of typefaces he considered his most important work in 1936, shortly before his retirement. Benton was relatively retiring in life: a 1936 interview described him as "one of the most difficult men to interview I have ever talked to...try to pin some honour on him, or give him credit for some achievement, and he will modestly sidestep with the remark that ‘Lady Luck helped me a lot there!’"


Technology

In addition to his strong aesthetic design sense, Benton was a master of the technology of his day. He read mechanical engineering at
Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
, graduating in 1896. His father,
Linn Boyd Benton Linn Boyd Benton (1844 in Little Falls, New York – 1932 in Plainfield, New Jersey) was an American typeface designer and inventor of technology for producing metal type. The son of Congressman Charles S. Benton, he was named for his fathe ...
, invented the
pantograph A pantograph (, from their original use for copying writing) is a mechanical linkage connected in a manner based on parallelograms so that the movement of one pen, in tracing an image, produces identical movements in a second pen. If a line dr ...
ic engraving machine, which was capable not only of scaling a single font design pattern to a variety of sizes while compensating for the size change, but could also condense, extend, and slant the design (mathematically, these are cases of affine transformation, which is the fundamental geometric operation of most systems of digital typography today, including
PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...
). Morris used these machines with his father at ATF, during which these machines were refined to an impressive level of precision. Theo Rehak, the current owner of much ATF typecasting equipment, and author of the definitive treatise ''Practical Typecasting'', explains that the Bentons demanded that any deviation in machining or casting be within two ten-thousandths of an inch. Most modern machine shops are equipped to measure down to one thousandth of an inch. As an advertising device, in 1922 ATF manufactured a piece of type eight points tall (0.11 inch) containing the entire
Lord's Prayer The Lord's Prayer, also called the Our Father or Pater Noster, is a central Christian prayer which Jesus taught as the way to pray. Two versions of this prayer are recorded in the gospels: a longer form within the Sermon on the Mount in the Gosp ...
in 13 lines of text, using a cutting tool roughly equivalent to a 2000-dpi printer.


References

*Baines, Phil; Haslam, Andrew (2005). ''Type and Typography.'' Watson-Guptill Publications. . *Blackwell, Lewis (2004). ''20th Century Type.'' Yale University Press: 2004. . *Cost, Patricia (2011). ''The Bentons: How an American Father and Son Changed the Printing Industry.'' Cary Graphic Arts Press. . *Fiedl, Frederich; Ott, Nicholas; Stein, Bernard Stein (1998). ''Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History.'' Black Dog & Leventhal. . *Jaspert, W. Pincus; Berry, W. Turner; Johnson, A. F. (1953, 1983). ''The Encyclopedia of Type Faces.'' Blandford Press. . * MacGrew, Mac (1993). ''American Metal Typefaces of the Twentieth Century''. New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Books. . *Macmillan, Neil (2006). ''An A–Z of Type Designers.'' Yale University Press. . *Meggs, Phillip B. (2002). ''Revival of the Fittest.'' RC Publications. . *Rollins, Carl Purlington. “American Type Designers and Their Work.” '' Print'', vol. 4, no. 1.


External links


Morris Benton blog, related to the 2011 book ''The Bentons: How an American Father and Son Changed the Printing Industry''
by Patricia Cost
Linn Boyd Benton, Morris Fuller Benton, and Typemaking at ATF
(PDF)

by Cynthia Jacquette

a set of vintage fonts released by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, including several by Benton

collection of samples of Benton's work, by
Luc Devroye Luc P. Devroye is a Belgian computer scientist and mathematician and a James McGill Professor in the School of Computer Science of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Devroye specializes in the probabilistic analysis of algorithms, r ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Benton, Morris Fuller 1872 births 1948 deaths American typographers and type designers Artists from Milwaukee Engineers from Wisconsin Cornell University College of Engineering alumni 20th-century American engineers