OpenType Pro fonts provide for the automatic insertion of small caps and ligatures in addition to offering an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages.Ĭomplete any project by pairing it with Agmena™, ITC Berkeley Old Style™, PMN Caecilia®, Demos® Next, Frutiger® Serif, Joanna® Nova or Malabar™. The ITC Franklin Gothic family is available as a suite of OpenType® Pro fonts, allowing graphic communicators to use this design while taking advantage of OpenType’s capabilities. Combine ITC Franklin Gothic with an old style or slab serif typeface and you’ll have copy that’s inviting and classic as an old pair of jeans. A natural for interactive design, it will bring a subtle, handcrafted quality to pages and screens. While ITC Franklin Gothic is essentially a display design intended for larger size settings, it’s also easy on the eyes in short blocks of text copy. For example, the left side of the A is lighter than the right, and the first stroke of the M is lighter than the other three. ITC Franklin Gothic retains all the strength and vitality typical of early American sans serif typefaces.Ĭapitals are wide (typographers would call them “square”), lowercase letters share the proportions and letter shapes of serif typefaces – and character stroke weights echo the serif-styled counterparts in that they have an obvious contrast. Although newer typeface families such as Helvetica®, Univers® and Frutiger® have the same basic proportions and attributes as Franklin Gothic, the similarity ends there. It retains the personality and character of the original typeface, with only a slight increase in x-height and character width to distinguish it from the first version.
The ITC Franklin Gothic is a reimagining of Franklin Gothic, a design that dates back to 1902. The family suite of typefaces is large and adaptable – and is as well-suited to web content and small screens, as it is to billboards and hard copy display ads. If Bruce Springsteen were a typeface, he would be ITC Franklin Gothic. Aotearoa Sans maintains some of the charming quirks of Franklin Gothic while updating its overall feel and improving its on-screen performance. The font has 2 styles: Light and Regular, the Regular being marginally bolder than the light. The ITC Franklin Gothic™ family embodies true American grit: it’s square-jawed and strong-armed, yet soft-spoken. SparkyType developed Aotearoa Sans as an updated and improved Franklin Gothic. This font contains twenty styles and family package options.īased on the original American Type Founders Franklin Gothic series, with enlarged x-height and condensed characters for readability and economy. One that’s based on Franklin Gothic might break a lot of those expectations.Franklin Gothic is an ITC Typeface designed by Morris Fuller Benton and Victor Caruso. I think maybe users have certain expectations for which type designs they will see on screen. It’s usually something very geometric you can think of Google’s proprietary font. It bucks the trend among a lot of tech companies that, when they are rebranding, they will always try to come up with a totally new design, not based on a past design. Probably even people who wouldn’t necessarily be able to look at the font and tell you the name of it still recognize that it kind of reminds them of a magazine or a newspaper from when they were little. If you look at old Time magazines, you’ll see it all over the cover.
That was a font that was very often used in newspaper headlines and magazines especially. I would say that this font does have kind of a midcentury feel, because it’s based on Franklin Gothic. Is there anything about this font that might make it suitable or unsuitable for tweets in particular? So when people say that they find the new letters more difficult to read than before, my first assumption would be that that’s only because they’re so used to seeing Twitter’s previous default font.
For example, in the Middle Ages, people found Gothic lettering to be extremely readable, right? The human brain is flexible enough that it can learn how to read any kind of script, and then when you try to present it with one that’s differently designed, it will find that challenging. What people find readable tends to be more cultural and experience-based than anything. In terms of readability, I would say that typeface readability is not really an exact science at all. They changed the spacing ever so slightly and changed the square dots over i and j, and then the period and comma to be circular. The font that they’re calling Chirp is extremely similar to GT America, which is itself based on Franklin Gothic.
Aaron Mak: What were your first impressions of the Chirp font and initial complaints about its readability?įredrick Brennan: Back in January, how it was announced was that Twitter had commissioned this bespoke font.