With this transaction, Monotype expands its library of 1,113 original typefaces, including popular typeface families such as Gotham, Mercury, Sentinel, Chronicle, Decimal and Archer. The Massachusetts-based, NASDAQ-listed American foundry has announced the acquisition of fellow New Yorker Hoefler&Co. And since many designers use Macintoshes, Avenir became a default choice over Gotham by the virtue of being preinstalled on all new Apple computers.Monotype signs a new acquisition. What also helped is that Apple included Avenir as a standard system font for Mac OS X starting in the 2000s. Avenir was much more affordable – and its licensing terms far more relaxed – so it became increasingly popular as the ‘poor designer’s Gotham’.Īvenir is an excellent design in itself: it’s easy to think of Gotham as a version of Avenir with a larger overall x-height. Some designers noticed a remarkable similarity between Gotham’s geometric letterforms and those of the late Adrian Frutiger’s Avenir typeface, which was quietly released in 1988. Nowadays, Gotham appears to be the default typeface used by American politicians for campaigning.īut not everyone could afford to license Gotham. Periodicals in New York – H&Cº’s home town – were the first mass-users, followed later by politicians. One interesting side-effect: during the 2000s, Gotham became a very popular typeface along with mid-century geometric slab-serifs like Monotype’s Rockwell. Gotham is the software product, and Monotype and H&Cº are the current licence owners. The reason why modern designers are required to license Gotham’s interpretation of these letterforms is because Tobias Frere-Jones decided to spend the time translating them into digital format. These letterforms were very popular in the architectural trade, because they were easy for architects and engineers to draw. If you look closely at American buildings dating back to the mid-20th century, you’ll notice similar letterforms being used. The irony is that the letterforms that you find in Gotham are not especially original. If you’re a professional who intends to produce designs that use Gotham to make money, then it’ll be your responsibility to see that you have purchased the appropriate font licences from H&Cº. Unless new H&Cº owner Monotype have dramatically changed the licensing terms on H&Cº fonts, it’s reasonable to assume that the versions of Gotham freely available online are not there out of H&Cº’s own choice. I’d have to refer back to my original Hoefler Type Foundry catalogues and specimens for precise details. Their licences have been much more specific than other typefoundries: even spelling out in the past precisely how tall characters could be if they were used to produce bitmap graphics (≤ 500 pixels). H&Cº have a long history of being especially proprietorial about their font licensing. There are also sites that claim that Gotham is free for personal use.īut Hoefler & Company (H&Cº) will beg to disagree, just like Adobe would do so about freely-available copies of software like Photoshop being available online for download. You’re correct that internet searches will bring up sites that offer free downloads of Gotham. H&Cº has a reputation in the type industry of being very thorough about such matters. Email: make sure to have copies of your original licences and receipts on hand.If you need to download new copies of the Gotham fonts that you’ve licensed, it’s best to contact Hoefler & Company directly: The chances of these H&Cº typefaces being made available on Adobe Fonts in the future is somewhat unlikely. The same applies to all other H&Cº typefaces. It’s never been available from anywhere else: especially not from the original Adobe Type Library and the current Adobe Fonts service. If you have a licence to use Gotham, the only place that you could have purchased it was directly from H&FJ / H&Cº. Hoefler & Company (H&Cº) – now owned by Monotype – publish and license the typeface today. Gotham is a typeface family designed by Tobias Frere-Jones, and was released by the Hoefler & Frere-Jones (H&FJ) typefoundry around 2000.
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