GOTHAM

GOTHAM GOTHAM GOTHAM (the typeface. not the city from batman.)

Gotham belongs to the sans-serif family. Quite a modern font

in terms of its age, it was born in the year 2000. The font of the future was designed by an American type designer called Tobias Frere-Jones. Throughout mid-twentieth century New York City, lay an array of architectural signage. This particular signage became quite popular and formed part of Frere-Jones' inspiration to creating this very font.

To start off, Gotham was introduced with a range of varying widths as well as an italic design. Print magazine commissioned the introduction of a rounded variant to the italic Gotham. Hoefler and Frere-Jones introduced new Narrow and Extra Narrow versions in 2009. With the recent presidential campaign, Obama had his people, who must know some other people, to get Hoefler and Frere-Jones to create a customised version of Gotham with serifs.

"Can We Add Serifs to Gotham? For the President of The United States? Yes We Can."

Gotham seems somewhat familiar even though it is so new. It has been used in many many cases from the Presidential Campaign for Obama to Coca Cola, Yahoo! and discovering things on the Discovery Channel. Gotham inherited an honest tone that's assertive but never imposing, friendly but never folksy, confident but never aloof. The font includes a lowercase, italics and comprehensive range of weights.

The original Gotham font was space-efficient, however they went along with designers requests to re-image Gotham as a text face. Thus, Gotham Narrow was born and specially engineered for text sizes. Gotham Narrow has the perfect proportions to fit any cramped situation whilst still retaining the original Gotham personality.

Gotham Condensed is has built on the original font by creating nine different weights ranging from Ultra to thin. The font itself is quite simple. It manages to be bold and sharp without weighing to much. It is simple, yet sophisticated.