Typeface. Introduced in 2000.
A font chosen because it has become one of my favorites.
I chose this font and worked on a project for it. A type cube.
First things first - Research
"Gotham. What letters look like.
Every designer has admired the no-nonsense lettering of the American vernacular, those letters of paint, plaster, neon, glass and steel that figure so prominently in the urban landscape. From these humble beginnings comes Gotham, a hard-working typeface for the ages.
Gotham celebrates the attractive and unassuming lettering of the city. New York is teeming with such letters, handmade sans serifs that share a common underlying structure, an engineer’s idea of “basic lettering” that transcends both the characteristics of their materials and the mannerisms of their makers. These are the cast bronze numbers that give office doorways their authority, and the markings on cornerstones whose neutral and equable style defies the passage of time. They’re the matter-of-fact neon signs that emblazon liquor stores and pharmacies, and the names of proprietors plainly painted on delivery trucks. These letters are straightforward and non-negotiable, yet possessed of great personality, and often expertly made. And although designers have lived with them for more than half a century, they remarkably went unrevived until 2000, when we introduced Gotham.
Gotham is that rarest of designs, the new typeface that feels somehow familiar. From the lettering that inspired it, Gotham inherited an honest tone that’s assertive but never imposing, friendly but never folksy, confident but never aloof. The inclusion of so many original ingredients without historical precedent — a lowercase, italics, a comprehensive range of weights and widths, and a character set that transcends the Latin alphabet — enhances these forms’ plainspokenness with a welcome sophistication, and brings a broad range of expressive voices to the Gotham family."
Features
Four Widths. New additions: Gotham now includes four different widths, from regular to condensed, each style paired with a matching italic.
Range. Without sacrificing its appeal at display sizes, Gotham has been crafted to flourish in text sizes as well.
Voice. Friendly without being folksy, confident without being aloof, Gotham’s many moods run from hip to nostalgic to brash to eloquent.
Numerics. For tables and charts, Gotham's core styles include a “Numeric” range that contains tabular figures, fractions, and extended symbols.
Extended Language Support. New for 2015: All Gotham packages now include the Latin-X™, Greek, and Cyrillic-X™ character sets, together covering more than 200 languages worldwide.
History
The Origin of Gotham
Ours is the first century in which most mass-produced letters can correctly be called “typography.” Technically speaking, typography is the product of type, the individual, recombinable characters in a typeface that are designed for printing words on paper. A century ago, a book’s pages contained typography, but its cover, spine, and illustrations featured lettering, each of the product of an artist working by hand in a different medium. Because letters made by hand had no obligation to resemble the look of printing types, different media evolved their own aesthetics: lithographed posters, engraved banknotes, and neon signs once enjoyed unique alphabetic styles.
An American Vernacular
Between the two World Wars, a style of sans serif lettering emerged from outside of the typographic tradition. These straightforward, highly legible, no-nonsense letters were especially popular in architecture (perhaps because they satisfied the engineer’s idea of “basic building lettering.”) Nowhere were these letters more popular than in New York, which was undergoing a period of explosive growth, and giving rise to the modern skyscraper. The style of bronze numbers on New York office buildings was echoed in engraved cornerstones, cast iron plaques, and painted signs — and equally popular among less monumental architecture: judging by how often it appears in signs for pharmacies and liquor stores, this might well be the natural form once followed by neon-lit channel letters. Nothing suggests that the makers of these different kinds of letters ever consciously followed the same model, but the consistency with which the style appears in the American urban landscape suggests that these forms were once considered in some way elemental. The arrival of mechanical signmaking in the 1960s contributed to their disappearance, and with the ascendance of digital fonts that could drive both vinyl cutters and CNC routers, they completely vanished from production.
In 2000, a commission to design a signature sans serif for GQ afforded us the chance to explore this style. We began with a long-bookmarked piece of public lettering on one of the city’s most mundane buildings: the Port Authority Bus Terminal on New York’s Eighth Avenue. With the goal of allowing our typeface to exhibit the mathematical reasoning of a draftsman, rather than the instincts of a typeface designer, we allowed Gotham to escape the grid wherever necessary, giving the design an affability usually missing from geometric faces. Unlike the signage upon which it was based, Gotham includes a lowercase, an italic, a full range of weights, and an extended range of widths: a Narrow, an Extra Narrow, and a Condensed.
Gotham is well known in the campaign of 08 for former President Obama.
With this research, I went on to create my type cube.
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