As Davis puts it, “Each of the top seven newspapers analyzed used custom fonts produced for them by leading type designers and foundries. One of the most interesting bits of information in the report is the number of newspapers that use custom fonts, designed specifically for them.
Most popular newspaper headline font series#
But what the study’s data does tell us is how often these retail fonts have been renamed or modified for individual newspapers-quite often, it turns out.įigure 2: Poynter Old Style Display, one of the several typeface families that make up Font Bureau’s Poynter Series of faces designed for newspapers And any time I see the typeface name “Garamond” without qualification, I get suspicious there are too many different typeface families with this name, and they’re not interchangeable. The Poynter Series is lumped together as though it were a single typeface super-family, instead of three families that work together. “Swiss” is not a typeface or a family but an entire category of typefaces, in Bitstream’s naming system. Helvetica and Helvetica Neue are listed separately, as they should be, but there’s no distinction between ITC Franklin Gothic and other versions of the face.
There are a few inconsistencies in the classification of typefaces. Though I could be wrong.) There’s also a third category: symbol and dingbat fonts, including barcodes. (It seems unlikely that Interstate, for instance, is being used as a text face. The study makes no distinction between text faces and display faces, although in many cases it’s easy to sort them out. Each is a very specialized kind of design.įigure 1: A front page from the “Rocky Mountain News” the primary typeface is a custom design, called Rocky, by Matthew Carter. Just as typeface designs for the screen are developed with that particular use in mind, typefaces for newspapers-especially text faces-are developed for the particular conditions of fast presses and ink on newsprint. This is a practical reality-check for type designers who aim to supply fonts for the newspaper market, and also for newspaper designers.Īscender Corporation was founded by former type designers and type marketers from Agfa Monotype (now Monotype Imaging), several of whom have specialized in developing fonts for the screen, so it’s not surprising that in this report Davis gives some attention to online editions of newspapers, and the challenges of reproducing the “brand” image of a paper onscreen when the typefaces (and the layout) were designed for the printed page. papers (by circulation), Bill Davis of Ascender summarizes the most frequently used typefaces, who designed them, where they came from, and whether they were custom designs or not. In a report called “ Fonts on the Front Page,” based on a study of the top 100 U.S. The recently formed Ascender Corporation has done something useful: They provided us with a snapshot of the fonts in current use on the front pages of American newspapers. You can find more from John at his website.
Most popular newspaper headline font download#
If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.Įventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro.
Dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D.
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