Franklin Gothic

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Category Sans-serif
Designer(s) Morris Fuller Benton
Foundry American Type Founders (ATF)
Re-issuing foundries Adobe, International Typeface Corporation, Monotype Imaging, URW

Franklin Gothic is a realist sans-serif typeface designed by Morris Fuller Benton (1872–1948) in 1902. The typeface is one of over 200 typefaces designed by Benton. There is an assumption that this typeface was named after Benjamin Franklin. “Gothic” is an increasingly archaic term meaning sans-serif, which is found primarily in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Franklin Gothic was originally designed as a typeface with a single weight and only two variations in width. Franklin Gothic has been used in many advertisements and headlines in newspapers. The typeface continues to maintain a high profile appearing in a variety of media from books to billboards.

At first only a Roman was released, but additional variants were added as Franklin Gothic became popular. A condensed design was drawn in 1905, and an extra condensed in 1906. Five years later Benton added an italic to the family, and two years after that a shaded font was offered.

In addition to Franklin Gothic, Morris Fuller Benton also designed the font in a condensed width with lighter weight, as News Gothic and Lightline Gothic. Extra condensed version became Alternate Gothic.

Contents

[edit] Characteristics

Franklin Gothic can be distinguished from other sans serif typefaces, as it has a more traditional double-story g. Other main distinguishing characteristics are the tail of the Q and the ear of the g. The tail of the Q curls down from the bottom center of the letterform in the book weight and shifts slightly to the right in the bolder fonts.

Franklin Gothic has an extra bold weight with a combination of subtle irregularities, tapering of strokes near junctions, in its roman form. Franklin Gothic has several widths and weights including Franklin Gothic book, medium, demi, heavy, condensed, and extra condensed.

[edit] ITC Franklin Gothic

Victor Caruso drew the multi-weight family for the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) in 1980. Caruso’s redrawing of Franklin Gothic for ITC consist of a slightly enlarged x-height and a moderately condensed lowercase alphabet. Other characteristics of this typeface consist of organic features that distinguish it from the geometric sans serifs. The font was originally released as two designs: one for display type and one for text. However, when Adobe commissioned the early digital fonts of ITC Franklin Gothic, the fonts were based on the display design, but characters were modified and spaced so they could also be used at small sizes. The idea was that the same font could be used to set type from tiny 6-point text to billboard-size letters. This digital interpretation became the standard for the digitized ITC Franklin Gothic family. This version has 4 weights, with complementary italics.

In 1991, ITC commissioned the Font Bureau in Boston to create condensed, compressed and extra compressed versions of ITC Franklin Gothic. Condensed versions were added by David Berlow. These fonts have 3, 2, 2 weight(s) respectively, with complementary italics except in extra compressed.

OpenType version supports ISO Adobe 2, Adobe CE, Latin extended characters. OpenType features include small caps, fractions, ligatures, lining figures, old style figure, ordinals, subscript/superscript.

It is also called 'Gothic 744' by Bitstream.

[edit] ITC Franklin Gothic Multilingual

It is a variant with support of Cyrillic, Turkish, Baltic characters, produced by ParaType.

Cyrillic version was developed at ParaType (ParaGraph) in 1993 by Isay Slutsker and Tatiana Lyskova. Condensed Cyrillic fonts were added in 2002 by Isay Slutsker and Dmitry Kirsanov.

OpenType features include small caps, ligatures, fractions, lining figures, old style figure, ordinals, proportional figures, subscript/superscript, tabular figures.

[edit] ITC Franklin

On 2004-09-30, ITC announced it and The Font Bureau Inc. were working on a multi-phase project to update and enlarge the ITC Franklin Gothic typeface family. The expanded product would be available in 2005, re-branded as the ITC Franklin family. Originally, the plan was to release both text and display designs as in the ITC Franklin Gothic family, but the family would include 72 fonts, with the first set of 32 display faces available from www.ITCFonts.com and www.fontbureau.com early 2005; while Text and agate weights, available through Font Bureau, would follow later in 2005. The fonts would be offered in PostScript, TrueType and OpenType font formats, where the OpenType format would include a suite of alternate characters, simpler access to tabular figures and other features.

The originally planned 32 display fonts would be distributed in 4 weights (black, bold, light, regular) with 4 widths each.[1]

However, the ITC Franklin venture became more extensive, more complicated and more time consuming than originally intended, so the release of ITC Franklin was delayed to June 2008.[2]

Designed by David Berlow, the display design family has 6 weights with 4 widths each, with complementary italics. Ultra and thin weights were added to the originally planned 4 weights, while regular was renamed to medium. The originally proposed PostScript format fonts were not sold by ITC and its corporate affiliates.

OpenType features include fractions, ligatures, ordinals, proportional figures, subscript/superscript, tabular figures, biform characters (lowercase characters drawn with the height and weight of capitals).

[edit] ITC Franklin Pro

This is a version that supports Central European and many Eastern European characters.

New OpenType features include localized forms.

[edit] ITC Franklin Text

This is an upcoming variant announced by ITC along with ITC Franklin.

[edit] Variants

Poynter Gothic Text is a variant based on 4-point ATF Franklin Gothic drawings, modifying proportions to mix with Poynter Oldstyle & Benton Gothic, and adjusting ends of curved strokes of letters C, G, S, a, c, e, r, s to suit news printing conditions.[3]

[edit] Availability

Digital versions of Franklin Gothic fonts have been produced by many foundries, such as URW (as URW Franklin Gothic), International Typeface Corporation (as ITC Franklin Gothic, ITC Franklin), Adobe (as Franklin Gothic, Franklin Gothic Std), Monotype Imaging (as Monotype Franklin Gothic).

[edit] Microsoft products

Franklin Gothic that are shipped with Microsoft products are based on URW outlines, with the Franklin Gothic trademark used under license from ITC.

Franklin Gothic version 1 is distributed with Microsoft Office since Office 97 SR1a. Distributed fonts include Book, Book Italic, Demi, Demi Cond, Demi Italic, Heavy, Heavy Italic, Medium, Medium Cond, Medium Italic. Version 2 of the fonts are shipped with Microsoft Office 2003.

Version 2 of Franklin Gothic Book, Book Italic, Demi, Demi Italic, Medium Cond are found in Microsoft Works 2002.

Windows XP includes Franklin Gothic Medium and Franklin Gothic Medium Italic version 2.20. Windows Vista includes version 5 of the fonts.

[edit] Usage

 This section needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2009)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Cees W. de Jong, Alston W. Purvis, Friedrich Friedl (2005-09-01). Creative Type: A Sourcebook of Classic and Contemporary Letterforms. Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0500512299/ISBN 978-0500512296.
  2. ^ What's New From ITC: June 2008
  3. ^ The Font Bureau, Inc. Poynter Gothic Text

[edit] External links

[edit] ITC Franklin Gothic

[edit] ITC Franklin

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Gothic"
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