'Unlike other sans serif typefaces, it's not German, it's not French, it's not Swiss,' he said. According to David Dunlap of The New York Times, Gotham 'deliberately evokes the blocky no-nonsense, unselfconscious architectural lettering that dominated the streetscape from the 1930s through the 1960s.' Andrew Romano of Newsweek concurs. Reviews of Gotham focus on its identity as something both American and specific to New York City. It was born outside the type design in some other world and has a very distinct flavor from that.' It's the kind of letter an engineer would make. This simplification of type is characterized by Frere-Jones as 'not the kind of letter a type designer would make. The lettering that inspired this typeface originated from the style of 1920s era sans-serifs like Futura, where 'Type, like architecture, like the organization of society itself, was to be reduced to its bare, efficient essentials, rid of undesirable, local or ethnic elements.' This theme was found frequently in Depression-era type in both North America and Europe, particularly Germany. It is also the current font to be used in title cards for film trailers in the US.ĭeveloped for professional use, Gotham is an extremely large family, featuring four widths, eight weights, and separate designs for screen display. The font has also been used as the cornerstone of the One World Trade Center, the tower built on the site of the former World Trade Center in New York. Since creation, Gotham has been highly visible due to its appearance in many notable places, including a large amount of campaign material created for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, and the 2016 federal election campaign of the Australian Labor Party. Gotham has a relatively broad design with a reasonably high x-height and wide apertures. Gotham's letterforms are inspired by a form of architectural signage that achieved popularity in the mid-twentieth century, and are especially popular throughout New York City. Gotham is a family of widely used geometric sans-serif digital typefaces designed by American type designer Tobias Frere-Jones in 2000.

Gotham typeface uses