Century Gothic Alternatives

The Spartan font family was released by American Type Founders around 1936 as an American copy of Futura. This popular design was used in a variety of ways, from short blocks of text to headlines to advertising and packaging. Spartan Classified was designed specifically for use at 5.5-point in classified advertising. Suitable at small sizes, the characters are wide with plenty of space around... Read More

FF Mark is one of the most iconic geometric sans serif typefaces of our time. Created by German type designers Hannes von Döhren, Christoph Koeberlin, and the FontFont Type Department in 2013, this versatile family draws on historical examples from German geometry in the 1920s. With additional creative input of Erik Spiekermann, they created a contemporary interpretation of classic German... Read More

Tim Ahrens on the design of his typeface, Linotype Aroma: "I started designing Linotype Aroma about six months after discovering that Frutiger is not a brand of candy and Garamond not the name of a perfume. I didn't want it to be one of these bland, faceless fonts that sacrifice the natural, independent character of their figures to neutrality. I believe that beauty is often created... Read More

Arial was designed for Monotype in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders. A contemporary sans serif design, Arial contains more humanist characteristics than many of its predecessors and as such is more in tune with the mood of the last decades of the twentieth century. The overall treatment of curves is softer and fuller than in most industrial style sans serif faces. Terminal strokes... Read More

FF Kievit explores the synthesis of the sans serif form to the structure and proportions of a traditional Renaissance Roman such as Garamond or Granjon. Work began on the typeface in 1995 when Mike Abbink was a student at Art Center in California. The family spans nine weights and includes small caps, true italics, and multiple figure sets – everything necessary for creating sophisticated... Read More

“Legato” is a musical term, meaning that the notes are played in a “connected” manner. This idea of connecting discrete units to enhance overall expression can be applied to the letters setting a text in precisely the same way. In designing FF Legato, Evert Bloemsma studied the extent to which the characters of the alphabet visually connect and build proper word and line images, then setting... Read More

FF Advert is an idiosyncratic and good-natured sans serif family for text in four weights. Its design is an homage to Metro, W. A. Dwiggins’ humanized geometric sans. The family is appreciated by graphic designers for including two unique lowercase ‘a’ forms in each font: single-story and double-story versions. The typeface is the work of Dutch designer Just van Rossum. A sister design exists... Read More

Based on square forms, FF QType successfully walks the difficult line between pure geometry and legibility. Achaz Reuss used his years of type design experience to flesh out a concept that could have been, in the hands of a student or amateur, a much less useful result. Five subfamilies make up the whole (Compressed, Condensed, Semi Extended, Extended and Square) each in five weights (Extra... Read More

Through his hands-on experience choosing fonts as a graphic designer, type newcomer André Simard developed a type family with a good measure of design sensibility. His ITC Migration™ Sans suite of fonts offers five readable weights that can be utilized across a variety of projects. Expect more to come from this designer-turned-typophile.

Helvetica is one of the most famous and popular typefaces in the world. It lends an air of lucid efficiency to any typographic message with its clean, no-nonsense shapes. The original typeface was called Neue Haas Grotesk, and was designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger for the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) in Switzerland. In 1960 the name was changed to Helvetica (an adaptation of... Read More

Rundfunk Grotesk font was produced together with Rundfunk Antiqua by the Linotype Design Studio in 1933-1935. The combination was originally intended for small point sizes and shorter texts. Unfortunately, this font was never completed and consists only of Antiqua roman and Grotesk bold. This unusual combination was chosen because small newspaper ads often use a semi bold for the headlines... Read More

Released in 1993, Ocean Sans is a sans serif design created for Monotype by the talented Malaysian designer, Ong ChongWah. The Ocean Sans font family has a distinct contrast between thick and thin strokes which sets it apart from the rather austere Grotesques with their more monotone appearance. Ocean Sans italic is an unusual design for a sans face, a strong cursive influence gives it a... Read More

A grown-up, no-nonsense sibling to Erik Spiekermann’s popular FF Meta, FF Unit irons out many of the quirks of its predecessor, dialing back the warmth to a comfortable, if a bit cool, room temperature. Set at small sizes, FF Unit’s legibility is aided by its increased contrast and simplified forms, all of which (a, g, i, j, l, U, M) have alternates. First released in 2003, FF Unit later... Read More

Twentieth Century was designed and drawn by Sol Hess in the Lanston Monotype drawing office between 1936 and 1947. The first weights were added to the Monotype typeface library in 1959. Twentieth Century is based on geometric shapes which originated in Germany in the early 1920's and became an integral part of the Bauhaus movement of that time. Form and function became the key words,... Read More

The successful Gill Sans® was designed by the English artist and type designer Eric Gill and issued by Monotype in 1928 to 1930. The roots of Gill Sans can be traced to the typeface that Gill's teacher, Edward Johnston, designed for the signage of the London Underground Railway in 1918. Gill´s alphabet is more classical in proportion and contains what have become known as his signature flared... Read More

Neuzeit Grotesk was originally designed by Wilhelm Pischner (1904-1989) and was released by the font foundry D. Stempel in 1928-1939. In 1970, the German Standards Committee advised the standard use of Neuzeit-Grotesk for official signage and traffic directional systems, and the abbreviation DIN was added to the name of the font. "DIN" stands for Deutsches Institut für Normung (The German... Read More

Linotype Ergo was designed by American Gary Munch, and was a winner in Linotype's Second International Digital Design Contest in 1997. Conceived as a blend of traditional and modern type concepts, it works as a legible text family as well as a lively display or headline font. The word ergo means "consequently," but it also comes from the Greek word "ergon" for "work." Consequently, Munch sees... Read More