Trade/News/Franklin Gothic Alternatives

The first cuts of Trade Gothic were designed by Jackson Burke in 1948. He continued to work on further weights and styles until 1960 while he was director of type development for Mergenthaler-Linotype in the USA. Trade Gothic does not display as much unifying family structure as other popular sans serif font families, but this dissonance adds a bit of earthy naturalism to its appeal. Trade... Read More

News Gothic No. 2 is an enhanced version of News Gothic produced by the D. Stempel AG type foundry in 1984. It added more weights to the News Gothic family than were available in other versions, increasing its use in contemporary design and communication.The lighter weights of the original News Gothic were designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1908 for American Typefounders (ATF). News Gothic... Read More

The ITC Franklin™ typeface design marks the next phase in the evolution of one of the most important American gothic typefaces. Morris Fuller Benton drew the original design in 1902 for American Type Founders (ATF); it was the first significant modernization of a nineteenth-century grotesque. Named in honor of Benjamin Franklin, the design not only became a best seller, it also served as a... Read More

FF Dagny is a spare sans serif drawn in the “grotesk” style. In 2002, Sweden’s largest daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) changed from broadsheet to tabloid format. The switch accompanied a major change in DN’s journalism, editing and design. Mario García of García Media had just redesigned DN two years previously in 2000. Pangea design’s Creative Director, Örjan Nordling, who had worked with... Read More

FF Sero combines the familiar forms of an American Grotesque with the legibility of a Humanist sans. It has open counters, a relatively high x-height and a homogeneous gray value. Inside the seven years of its development, the classic letterforms matured to reveal a balanced, distincitve design. Eight carefully stepped weights and an extensive character set allow for a sophisticated and... Read More

FF Good is a straight-sided sans serif in the American Gothic tradition, designed by Warsaw-based Łukasz Dziedzic. Despite having something of an “old-fashioned” heritage, FF Good feels new. Many customers agree: the sturdy, legible forms of FF Good have been put to good use in the Polish-language magazine ‘Komputer Swiat,’ the German and Russian edition of the celebrity tabloid OK!, and the... Read More

Typefaces without serifs were known in nineteenth-century England as Grotesque (or Grotesk in German) because they seemed so unusual to most readers. Monotype Grotesque font is a straightforward 1926 design that is among the earliest sans serifs cut for hot-metal machine typesetting. Its simple, clean lines make it amenable for text use, and the condensed and extended versions are useful for... Read More

Tablet Gothic from Veronika Burian and José Scaglione of TypeTogether makes brilliant harmony of two disparate grotesque models in a healthy number of widths and weights. First created for setting titles in periodicals, the project grew to handle text setting quite well, with a comfortably loose fit in the regular weights. The overall tone stays friendly throughout, helped by the face’s active,... Read More

The spark behind the creation FF Hydra family came from observing 19th and early 20th century French poster lettering. Its designer Silvio Napoleone found that the styles of this period combined whimsical, economic, and impactful qualities. A typeface that incorporated these characteristics could be especially relevant to today’s design aesthetic. Naploeone began by sketching an extremely... Read More