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Difference between Gothic and Blackletter?
Posted by chrisburton in
12 Dec 2012 — 6:36am
12 Dec 2012 — 6:36am
I come across typefaces such as Trade Gothic yet it is a sans-serif. There's obviously a difference between that and blackletter so what am I misunderstanding?
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12 Dec 2012 — 7:02am
Gothic is an older term for sans-serif that is still commonly used in East Asian typography. More information can be found on the Wikipedia pages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-serif
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_gothic_typeface
Apparently, "In English, Gothic is an outmoded typographic term for sans-serif. It was so named because the type color of early sans serif typefaces was thought to be similar to that of the blackletter or “gothic” script. The term “gothic” is now rare in English, having been largely replaced by "sans-serif" except in the names of some typefaces such as "Century Gothic"."
12 Dec 2012 — 7:21am
Thanks, Karl. That certainly makes a lot of sense.
12 Dec 2012 — 7:51am
“Gothic” was the North American term for sans serif.
Hence Franklin Gothic, News Gothic, Trade Gothic, Century Gothic and more recently my Brown Gothic … and Gotham.
However, perhaps due to the international nature of the present day font market, we now mostly refer to “sans serif” types, if not those that are specifically “grotesque”.
12 Dec 2012 — 10:48am
Gotham is a name for New York City, and the typeface is so named because it was inspired by old lettering on buildings in the city. Not related to Gothic as a name for sans, so far as I know.
12 Dec 2012 — 12:30pm
Well yeah, but don’t you think there was also some punnery involved in its naming?
15 Dec 2012 — 5:47pm
No more punnery than when in 1939 Bob Kane and Bill Finger chose Gotham as the name for Batman's city, or 130 years earlier when Washington Irving used it as a nickname for NYC.
15 Dec 2012 — 8:18pm
Those were metaphors, comparing one city/town to another.
A pun is a word which has two meanings, in this case the name of a city and a category of typeface.
15 Dec 2012 — 11:12pm
Yes - my intent was to note that H&FJ used the name specifically because it was associated with New York, and the style of the typeface was based on lettering commonly found on the city's buildings. So if there was a pun involved, it wasn't intended.
H&FJ's history of Gotham
- Herb
16 Dec 2012 — 11:59am
… if there was a pun involved, it wasn't intended.
Really?
Jonathan and Tobias are quite eloquent chaps y’know.
I wouldn’t put it past them to come up with a multi-meaninged typeface name.
Jonathan has written some quite erudite essays, for instance “On Classifying Type” for Emigre magazine, and Tobias wrote many of the very witty specimen texts for the Font Bureau when he was there, if I’m not mistaken.
16 Dec 2012 — 12:19pm
Good post.
16 Dec 2012 — 5:52pm
Where does the term grotesque enter into the description for a san-serif? I don't find san-serif fonts to be outlandish, bizarre, or distorted.
16 Dec 2012 — 7:36pm
You don't. But back when the very first sans-serif faces were designed, they did seem grotesque to people then.
16 Dec 2012 — 10:05pm
The meaning of “grotesque” is open to interpretation.
Refer to The Nymph and the Grot by James Mosley, the definitive history of the emergence of the sans serif letter form.
17 Dec 2012 — 10:14am
Does intention matter?
When I consider Gotham I think of NYC, but the connotation of "Gothic" type is also packaged into my experience.
Grotesque: I thought this categorization occurred because these sans-serifs were considered grotesque in comparison to the at-the-time more conventional serif. (Citation needed)