| Date: 1937 Designer:
Chauncey H. Griffith Foundry:
Bell Telephone Company / Mergenthaler Linotype Location:
New York, USA Current equivalent:
Linotype Bell Gothic See also:
Bell Centennial by Matthew Carter, Griffith Gothic by Tobias Frere-Jones, Furlong, Market Gothic
Technologies:
Metal (foundry)
Metal (machine)
Photosetting
Postscript | | Famous for:
The first sans serif designed expressly for saving space. Applications: Telephone directory typesetting. Ubiquity:
Widely used. Category:
Sans Serif Neo Grotesque Stress: Vertical
Serifs: Sans Serif | | Design history:
Designed to optimise both space and legibility at small sizes for printing telephone directories, throughout America. A direct response to the problems of ink spread on absorbent newspaper at 6pt and smaller, the oversized ink traps at the junctions of the letterforms and sheared terminals have been exploited in recent years as a design feature of their own. In 1978 Matthew Carter was commissioned by AT&T to redesign the typeface to resolve imaging problems encountered with new cathode ray tube (CRT) photocomposition machines. The redesign was named Bell Centennial in honour of the centenary of Alexander Graham Bell. | |  |
