Itc Franklin Gothic Free
Floriana Grundy
Here we are presenting you with another sans-serif typeface that was Morris Fuller Benton in the early years of the 20th century and it was released by American Type Founders known as franklin Gothic Font.
This typeface can be a great choice to be used inside the media. This typeface is quite famous for its use in advertisement text and newspaper headlines. Basically, this font is inspired by a famous typeface Kabel and Futura.
Probably it was the bold weight of the letterform which prompted the designation. In any event, the Boston firm was the first American foundry to introduce the surface design which was entertaining great popularity in Europe, particularly in England and Germany.
At the present time, when sans serif types completely dominate the typography of the marketplace, it is difficult to recall that type founders, up to the beginning of the 19th century, sought only to please the printers. The Industrial Revolution brought printers, as the manufacturers, countless changes, for better or worse. The first evidence of these changes was the introduction of extra-bold types patterned somewhat on the forms of the Didot and Bodoni styles. Called fat faces, these types were eagerly received by printers specializing in the production of broadsides, and bills, etc.
In 1832 three English foundries introduced bold sans serif. One of these firms, William Thorowgood, called the style grotesque, a term which is still standard in Britain for sans serif types which originated in the 19th century.
Some of these had such exotic names as Turius, Altona, Octic, Telescope, etc., but most of them were simply numbered. Many of the styles were difficult to tell apart, but all of the widths now common in gothic series were represented, from extra condensed to extra extended.
In 1896, a Cornell-trained engineer named Morris Benton joined ATF as assistant to his father, Linn Boyd Benton, inventor of the pantograph machine engraving of punches and matrices. The younger Benton was given the responsibility of standardizing the production of the foundry, which at that point was overwhelmed by the vast accumulation of matrices acquired from the member firms.
When Benton began the cutting of the Franklin Gothic series in 1903, he was no doubt somewhat influenced by the German activity in the production of sans serif type. In 1898 the Berthold foundry produced the Akzidenz series (now known to contemporary American printers as Standard) which proved to be very popular and inspire the cutting of Reform Grotesk by Stempel in 1903 and the Venus series by Bauer in 1907.
The successor Franklin Gothic maybe noted by its availability for machine setting. The type is now manufactured by Monotype, Intertype, Mergenthaler, and Ludlow, and of course by the various phototypesetting devices.
Accentuating the typefaces unique qualities and history was also important, but we were given more creative freedom to chose what and how to illustrate them. The overall goal of the project was to exhibit our understanding of visual hierarchy through effective arrangement of elements, to employ effective color choices to create emotional subtext, and utilize typography as a medium of expression. The only rule was that we had to leave the characters un-distorted, as they were originally designed.
Soo, I went on with the goal of finding the most fluid and uncongested design I could make. Which is were the following two designs came from. I liked the symetry that the design on the left had, but when I tried to change the letters or add in more information, the entire design imediately felt cluttered. I felt that the design on the right offered more room for information, but in itself felt really cluttered with overlapping characters. I felt that these tesselated patterns relied too heavily on the patterns and not enough on the actual font to convey meaning in the poster. So in order to solve this issue, I had to create a more spaced out and clear display which would have room to incorporate all the information.
This led me to the design that I ended up iterating on for the remainder of the project. The design encompasses everything I was trying to express without feeling overtly cluttered. The sweeping feel and the sideways words give it an almost magazine look which highlights the value Franklin Gothic has as a header. The large gaps left plenty of room for more elements. The color in this iteration was mostly just a test to see if it could support color which seems evident in the mixture (albeit clashing).
The next step was to integrate the rest of the content which was pretty much a breeze for the paragraph text as well as the year the font was created. The Pattern left a perfect block at the bottom of the page for content. I knew that franklin gothic is notoriously misused as a body font. The characters in long continuous strings seem to almost blur together making the font terrible for body text. So in order to counteract that weakness I grouped the text into three small and concise paragraphs. I wanted to accentuate each of the main flaws of the font as a body text so I aligned the left paragraph left, the right right, and the center justified. The left showed how choppy the edges get, the center showed the intense kerning issues, and the right shows how difficult it can be to read along the lines of the extreme sans serif font.
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