Wide Grotesque

Stephen Coles

Last edited May 15, 2014

Extended grotesque/gothic sans serifs, most from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Often, these are available only as small caps fonts, but there are some later designs with full character sets.

Sackers Roman is an engraver, all-capitals family for invitations and stationery. The letters have strong contrast between thin and thick strokes. See also Sackers Gothic,Sackers Square Gothic,Sackers Script,and Sackers Classic Roman.

The Burin family of typefaces consists of Roman and Sans variations. Burin Roman has very distinct lowercase characters b, c, d, g and y with a quirky use of tapered strokes and hairlines. Burin Sans is a light display face with an extended tail on the lowercase y.

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

In 1983, D. Stempel AG redesigned the famous Helvetica typeface for the digital age, creating Neue Helvetica for Linotype: a self-contained font family. Today, this family consists of 51 different font weights. It’s original numbering system for the weight designations came from Adrian Frutiger’s numbering system for the Univers family. The basic font weight, “Neue Helvetica Roman”, is at the... Read More