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New Lincoln Gothic BT

New Lincoln Gothic BT

by Bitstream
Individual Styles from $50.99
Complete family of 24 fonts: $776.99
New Lincoln Gothic BT Font Family was designed by Thomas Lincoln and published by Bitstream. New Lincoln Gothic BT contains 24 styles and family package options.

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About New Lincoln Gothic BT Font Family


New Lincoln Gothic is an elegant sanserif, generous in width and x-height. There are twelve weights ranging from Hairline to UltraBold and an italic for each weight. At the stroke ends are gentle flares, and some of the round characters possess an interesting and distinctive asymmetry. The character set supports Central Europe, and there are three figure sets, extended fractions, superior and inferior numbers, and a few alternates, all accessible via OpenType features. Back in 1965, Thomas Lincoln had an idea for a new sanserif typeface, a homage of sorts, to ancient Roman artisans. The Trajan Column in Rome, erected in 113 AD, has an inscription that is considered to be the basis for western European lettering. Lincoln admired these beautiful letterforms and so, being inspired, he set out to design a new sanserif typeface based on the proportions and subtleties of the letters found in the Trajan Inscription. Lincoln accomplished what he set out to do by creating Lincoln Gothic. The typeface consisted only of capital letters. Lincoln intentionally omitted a lowercase to keep true his reference to the Trajan Inscription, which contains only magiscule specimens. The design won him the first Visual Graphics Corporation (VGC) National Typeface Competition in 1965. The legendary Herb Lubalin even used it to design a promotional poster! All this was back in the day when typositor film strips and photo type were all the rage in setting headlines. Fast forward now to the next millennium. Thomas Lincoln has had a long, illustrious career as a graphic designer. Still, he has one project that feels incomplete; Lincoln Gothic does not have a lowercase. It is the need to finish the design that drives Lincoln to resurrect his prize winning design and create its digital incarnation. Thus, New Lincoln Gothic was born. Lacking the original drawings, Lincoln had to locate some old typositor strips in order to get started. He had them scanned and imported the data into Freehand where he refined the shapes and sketched out a lowercase. He then imported that data into Fontographer, where he worked the glyphs again and refined the spacing, and started generating additional weights and italics. His enthusiasm went unchecked and he created 14 weights! It was about that time that Lincoln contacted Bitstream about publishing the family. Lincoln worked with Bitstream to narrow down the family (only to twelve weights), interpolate the various weights using three masters, and extend the character set to support CE and some alternate figure sets. Bitstream handled the hinting and all production details and built the final CFF OpenType fonts using FontLab Studio 5.

Designers: Thomas Lincoln

Publisher: Bitstream

Foundry: Bitstream

Design Owner: Bitstream

MyFonts debut: null

New Lincoln Gothic BT

About Bitstream

Bitstream is known among type enthusiasts and professionals alike as being one of the companies that lead the way towards the democratization of type. For centuries, the type world had been the exclusive domain of skilled typographers who worked large, cumbersome presses. With the birth of digital type though, came a revolution in the industry that enabled Bitstream, one of the first digital type foundries, to help grow the desktop publishing industry. The company’s founders shared a vision in which desktop publishing and digital type would open up doors and allow for the access of previously exclusive typefaces to a broader public audience. Eventually, this idea of opening up the type market led to the development of fonts like Amerigo and New Lincoln Gothic; designs that played huge roles in the launching, and eventual success, of desktop publishing. With best-selling typefaces like Futura in its line up, this library made an enormous impact on the type industry and helped to form it into what it is today.

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