News Gothic is a

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 ...

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

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 percent of all type manufactured in the United States at the time. De Vinne, Theodore Low, ''The Practice of Typogr ...

(ATF). The typeface is similar in proportion and structure to

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 desig ...

, also designed by Benton, but lighter. News Gothic, like other Benton sans serif typefaces, follows the grotesque model, resembling

serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ( ...

text faces of the period, with a double-storey lower-case 'a' and 'g'. Also distinctive are the blunt terminus at the apex of the lowercase 't', and the location of the tail of the uppercase 'Q' completely outside the bowl. The letter forms are compact, and descenders are shallow. The typeface differs from other grotesque sans-serifs in its rather light weight and open letterforms, contributing to a less severe, humanist tone of voice. For much of the twentieth century, News Gothic was used in newspaper and magazine publishing with copies available on

Monotype Monotyping is a type of printmaking made by drawing or painting on a smooth, non-absorbent surface. The surface, or matrix, was historically a copper etching plate, but in contemporary work it can vary from zinc or glass to acrylic glass. The ...

and Intertype machines for

hot metal typesetting In printing and typography, hot metal typesetting (also called mechanical typesetting, hot lead typesetting, hot metal, and hot type) is a technology for typesetting text in letterpress printing. This method injects molten type metal into a mo ...

. Both companies added additional weights to the family. For use in headlines, it was designed with condensed and extra-condensed styles. 'Gothic' was an early twentieth century term for sans-serifs, found mostly in the United States and Canada. It was also used in the UK, along with 'grotesque'. In Germany the term 'Grotesk' was used.

Metal type release

Benton's autobiographical notes list the following designs as his contributions to the family: *''News Gothic'' *''News Gothic Condensed'' *''News Gothic Extra Condensed'' ATF's 1923 specimen book also shows: *''News Gothic Extra Condensed Title'' (a headline face) As with Franklin Gothic, the foundry expanded the line sometime later, adding two more variants: *''News Gothic Bold'' (1958) designed by John L. “Bud” Renshaw; Intertype had already released a bold News Gothic in a hot metal typesetting version, however, as later did Monotype. *''News Gothic Condensed Bold'' (1965) designed by Frank Bartuska; versions also by Monotype and Intertype Both Monotype and Intertype released

oblique Oblique may refer to: * an alternative name for the character usually called a slash (punctuation) ( / ) *Oblique angle, in geometry * Oblique triangle, in geometry * Oblique lattice, in geometry * Oblique leaf base, a characteristic shape of the ...

versions; McGrew reports that while ATF's archives contained 1912 production drawings for an oblique "we have no record of its production".

Cold type copies

Virtually all producers of cold type offered their own versions of ''News Gothic'' under different names: *''News Gothic'' — Alphatype, Autologic, Berthold,

Compugraphic Compugraphic Corporation, commonly called cg, was an American producer of typesetting systems and phototypesetting equipment, based in Wilmington, Massachusetts, a few miles from where it was founded. This company is distinct from Compugraphics, ...

, Dymo, Harris, MGD Graphic Systems,

, Varityper *''Gothstar Trade'' — Star/Photon *''Toledo'' — Graphic Systems Inc.

Digital releases

Because there is no active descendant of the American Type Founders Corporation making digital typefaces, ''News Gothic'' has been revived in digital form in many different versions from different sources. Benton Sans is a greatly expanded font family based on News Gothic by Font Bureau, adding additional features such as wide styles and extra-bold weights. At 80 styles, it is one of the most comprehensive digital renditions of the News Gothic style. Its users include ''Newsweek'', ''Fortune'' magazine, the ''Boston Globe'' and Sotheby's. Digital releases actually named News Gothic have a variety of features, often adding in weights not present in the original design or removing some less popular ones. For example, Bitstream's release is rare in including the extra-condensed styles.

URW++ URW Type Foundry GmbH (formerly URW++ Design & Development GmbH) is a type foundry based in Hamburg, Germany. The foundry has its own library with more than 500 font families. The company specializes in customized corporate typefaces and the dev ...

's (also sold by Fontsite) is only sold in one width but in a wide range of weights and with italics for every weight, while Linotype's lacks a light weight or any condensed styles. Monotype's revival, a subset of which is included with many Microsoft products, features the condensed style but not extra-condensed, and has wider spacing than several others.

Adobe Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is use ...

, Linotype and

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 ...

have their own versions. The

version of News Gothic was extended with Cyrillic glyphs in 2005 and Greek glyphs in 2009 by Dmitry Kirsanov for ParaType, and is sold by them separately. Hamburg Serial is a lesser-known version of News Gothic by

SoftMaker SoftMaker Software GmbH is a German software company based in Nuremberg that produces office productivity software and digital fonts. SoftMaker was founded in 1987 by Martin Kotulla. Best known in Germany and the EU, SoftMaker is offering its ...

, with italics that have a one-story 'a' and 'g'. News Gothic No. 2 is an enhanced version of News Gothic produced by the D. Stempel AG type foundry in 1984. It adds more weights to the News Gothic family than were available in other versions.

Source Sans Pro Source Sans (known as Source Sans Pro before 2021) is a sans-serif typeface created by Paul D. Hunt, released by Adobe in 2012. It is the first open-source font family from Adobe, distributed under the SIL Open Font License. The typeface is in ...

is a single-width design based on News Gothic, but differs in having true italics and a larger

x-height upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the le ...

for use with onscreen display. It was released in 2012 as Adobe's first open-source family under the

SIL 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 Global, the ...

; Adobe's training material highlights it as having a more consistent

colour Color (or colour in Commonwealth English; see spelling differences) is the visual perception based on the electromagnetic spectrum. Though color is not an inherent property of matter, color perception is related to an object's light absorp ...

on the page than the rather condensed News Gothic. News Cycle is an open-source variant by Nathan Willis based on 1908 specimens of News Gothic typeface from ATF extended with full Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic glyphs. It is an open source typeface licensed under the

Similar designs

Linotype called their similar design '' Trade Gothic'' while the

Ludlow Ludlow ( ) is a market town and civil parish in Shropshire (district), Shropshire, England. It is located south of Shrewsbury and north of Hereford, on the A49 road (Great Britain), A49 road which bypasses the town. The town is near the conf ...

version was known as ''Record Gothic''. Intertype copied the face under the same name and added a variant, ''News Gothic Bold'' (1955). Baltimore Type's copy was called ''Balto Gothic,'' while their copy of Inland Type Foundry's ''Inland Gothic No. 6'' was perversely sold under the name ''News Gothic.'' In 1916,

Sol Hess Sol Hess (born 1886, Philadelphia, PA – d. 1953) was an American typeface designer. After a three-year scholarship course at Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Design, he began at Lanston Monotype in 1902, rising to typographic mana ...

made alternate rounded characters for ''News Gothic Extra Condensed'' and the resulting face was sold by

Lanston Monotype Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc., founded as Lanston Monotype Machine Company in 1887 in Philadelphia by Tolbert Lanston, is an American (historically Anglo-American) company that specializes in digital typesetting and typeface design for use with ...

as ''Jefferson Gothic,'' which was also sold by Baltimore Type as ''Tourist Extra Condensed'' In 1935, M.F. Benton did much the same thing for A.T.F. and the face was called ''Phenix.'' Ludlow's ''Record Gothic'' began as a mere knock-off but, between 1956 and 1961, their in-house designer, R. Hunter Middleton made many original additions to the family including: *''Record Gothic Condensed Italic'' *''Record Gothic Extended + Italic'' *''Record Gothic Bold + Italic'' *''Record Gothic Bold Condensed'' *''Record Gothic Bold Extended + Italic'' *''Record Gothic Bold Extended Reverse'' *''Record Gothic Thinline condensed'' *''Record Gothic Heavy Condensed'' *''Record Gothic Light Medium-Extended'' *''Record Gothic Medium-Extended + Italic'' *''Record Gothic Bold Medium-Extended'' *''Record Gothic Heavy Medium-Extended'' Record Gothic is, again, a very inconsistent family, and has never been fully digitised. Yu Gothic is a Japanese font bundled with some versions of Windows, but the Latin glyphs look similar to News Gothic. The fonts are otherwise unrelated.

Notable usages

*The bold variant of News Gothic is used in the logo for the Swedish pop group

ABBA ABBA ( ) were a Swedish pop group formed in Stockholm in 1972 by Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. They are one of the most popular and successful musical groups of all time, and are one of the List ...

, a logo conceived in 1976 by Rune Söderqvist. *News Gothic Bold was used in the

Star Wars opening crawl The ''Star Wars'' opening crawl is a signature device of the opening sequences of every numbered film of the ''Star Wars'' series, an American epic space opera franchise created by George Lucas. Within a black sky background featuring a smatterin ...

for the main body of the text, as well as for the closing credits of each of the films in that series. *The version of News Gothic that was on IBM typesetters was used widely by Fluxus artists such as

George Maciunas George Maciunas (; ; November 8, 1931 Kaunas – May 9, 1978 Boston, Massachusetts) was a Lithuanian American artist, art historian, and art organizer who was the founding member and central coordinator of Fluxus, an international community of ...

(in his Fluxpublications) and

George Brecht George Brecht (August 27, 1926 – December 5, 2008), born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer, as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnso ...

(in his event scores). *The logo adopted by Polaroid Corporation in the late 1950s, designed by Paul Giambarba, is set in News Gothic, as was much of the type on the company's packaging and documentation up until the 1980s. *

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) was an American Multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in 1892, incorporated in the New York (state), state of New York and headquartered in Boston. Over the year ...

used a variant of the News Gothic typeface in transition from 2003 until they debuted the GE Inspira typeface in July 2004. * The numbers on the vertical

split-flap display A split-flap display, or sometimes simply a flap display, is a digital electromechanical display device that presents changeable alphanumeric text, and occasionally fixed graphics. They were (from the 1960s to 1990s) commonly used as public tr ...

s found in game shows from the late 1960s through the 1970s used News Gothic Bold. * The letter tiles in the original American version of

Scrabble ''Scrabble'' is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a Board game, game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, re ...

are in News Gothic. *The Halton Catholic District School Board uses News Gothic as the primary typeface in all of its communications and reports, as well as its logo. *Heidelberg Gothic, a variant of News Gothic, is the house font of the Heidelberg Gruppe. *JCP News Gothic commissioned by JC Penney consists of two new weights coordinated with

News Gothic, and is designed for use in advertising campaigns. *The primary

State Farm State Farm Insurance is a group of mutual insurance companies throughout the United States with corporate headquarters in Bloomington, Illinois. Founded in 1922, it is the largest property and casualty insurance, property, casualty and auto i ...

typeface is SF News Gothic, a branded version of News Gothic. * By law, the legend of the Seal of Ohio is set in News Gothic.

Bibliography

*Baines, Phil, Hastam, Andrew. ''Type and Typography''. Watson-Guptill Publications: 2005. . *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 Encyclopædia of Type Faces'', Blandford Press Lts.: 1953, 1983. . *Macmillan, Neil. ''An A–Z of Type Designers''. Yale University Press: 2006. . *Meggs, Phillip B. ''Revival of the Fittest'', RC Publications, Inc: 2002. {{ISBN, 1-883915-08-2.

References

Grotesque sans-serif typefaces Newspaper and magazine typefaces American Type Founders typefaces American gothic typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1908 Monotype typefaces Typefaces designed by Morris Fuller Benton