TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Wed Nov 20 11:47:20 EST 2024
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Font Plague: Century Gothic
[Michael Bojkowski]
A rant in 2008 by Boicozine about Century Gothic. Quoting some passages: So it was that Arial came to prominence. The poor bastard child of Helvetica, it was produced to get around having to pay to license the real thing. It's Helvetica with crappy bits thrown in to avoid any law suits. Of course, it been around long enough now that a certain mystique have developed around it, helped by the rise of Ascender Corp [ascendercorp.com], who were born out of the ashes of Microsoft's typography division [microsoft.com/typography] clutching a swag of valuable font licenses and continue to hold sway over of computer operating systems the world over. Which brings me neatly round to Century Gothic. Century Gothic is [...] everywhere at the moment from M&S Connoisseur packaging, to the Casino Royale to PC World's recent rebrand to the City of London's collateral and so on. It is essentially Futura or Avant Garde with crappy bits thrown in to avoid licensing costs again. Only this time around Ascender have learnt from criticism levelled at Arial (which they continue to naively contest) and imbued it with an historical context, basing the design, very loosely, on a typeface developed around the 1940s by little known typographer, Sol Hess [linotype.com]. Their choice to work-up a Monotype typeface is ripe too. Monotype have reproduced and renamed a number of replicant typefaces throughout their often dubious history. Credit: The poster atop this page was made in 2012 by Studio Jess. The careful reader should pick up the inconsitencies in Boicozine's rant---Arial is far from a bastard child of Helvetica, and calling Sol Hess a little known typographer is like performing harakiri during ATypI's opening ceremony. |
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Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ https://luc.devroye.org ⦿ https://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html |