As a part of the
Bell family typeface,
which was originally cut by Richard Austin for John Bell in 1788, the newer Bell
Gothic font was designed in 1937 by Chauncey H. Griffith (Linotype.com, n.d.). This
typeface was created for, and owned by, AT&T for the printing of phone numbers
in their telephone directories, and is classified as both a Sans Serif and
Gothic font (TOL, 2009). In original use of the typeface the Bell Gothic Bold
and Light font weights were used together, bold for the names of subscribers
and light for setting addresses (Sherman,
n.d.).
The typeface had
been designed according to the technology of the time, including the Linotype
machine and letterpress, but did not perform well with the new technology which
“was being done photographically with Cathode Ray Typesetting (CRT), and the
printing done on high-speed offset lithography presses” (Sherman, n.d.). This
therefore would cause issues in lettering including broken letterforms,
lightened strokes, and “sometimes eroding completely at the intersections of
straight and curved strokes” (Sherman,
n.d.). Hence, this font was eventually superseded by the Bell Centennial
typeface designed by Matthew Carter which was intended to work with the newer
technologies (Sherman,
n.d.).
The current
owners of all forms of the Bell Gothic typeface is Linotype who license Bell
Gothic Light, Bell Gothic Bold, and Bell Gothic Black fonts for use in forms of
desktop, website, mobile app, e-book, and server (Linotype.com,
n.d.). The pricing of the fonts varies for each form, depending on variables
such as the number of desktops, website views, app installs, versions of
e-book, and server CPU cores, as well as the language or format the customer
wishes to purchase (Linotype.com, n.d.).
In modern use,
Bell Gothic continues to appear in a variety of advertisements, magazines, book
covers, and more, as seen in example images from the publicly curated gallery from the Fonts In Use website (Fontsinuse.com, n.d.):
References
No comments:
Post a Comment