The hardest working font in Manhattan

February 14, 2025 1:57 PM

In 2007, on my first trip to New York City, I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love. I admired American Typewriter in all of the I <3 NYC logos, watched Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica fighting over the subway signs, and even caught an occasional appearance of the flawlessly-named Gotham, still a year before it skyrocketed in popularity via Barack Obama’s first campaign. But there was one font I didn’t even notice, even though it was everywhere around me.
posted by Wolfdog (35 comments total)

Was just coming here to post this. It's very rare that I read a really long article all the way to the end and I loved every minute of this one. So thinky. So well-illustrated.
posted by jessamyn at 1:59 PM on February 14 [14 favorites]

I also just came here to post this! It's such a wonderful and detailed piece.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:02 PM on February 14 [1 favorite]

This is fascinating.
posted by mrphancy at 2:08 PM on February 14 [1 favorite]

The treatment was a bit cursory.
posted by Lemkin at 2:16 PM on February 14 [2 favorites]

I found it more grotesk.
posted by nathan_teske at 2:20 PM on February 14 [2 favorites]

This sort of story is my kind of jam, but the site was illegible. On my phone, all the text is smashed against the left side of the screen, and no line of text is more than three or four words long. And none of the images load.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:42 PM on February 14 [3 favorites]

This is gorgeous. The tactility of routed text is deeply embedded in my memories of childhood-- while reading this article I could feel my fingertip, much smaller and softer than it is today, tracing the floor numbers on the elevator to my grandparent's apartment, a plastic sign near a swimming pool. It is a font, but also a texture and a lightning bolt of recollection.

The next time I pass some routed Gorton I'm going to run my finger over it and see if it makes me feel like a kid again.
posted by phooky at 2:49 PM on February 14 [4 favorites]

This post is absolutely fantastic. Do give the link time for all the pictures to load.

Here is a link to Open Gorton, based on Gorton Modified.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:53 PM on February 14 [12 favorites]

To add them on macOS, open the Terminal app, then:

$ git clone https://github.com/dakotafelder/open-gorton.git
$ cd open-gorton
$ open OpenGorton-*

In the Font Book app that opens up, click on the Install button.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:58 PM on February 14 [11 favorites]

I love city identity type stuff - still can never find what the font is for Pasadena though.
posted by drewbage1847 at 3:04 PM on February 14 [1 favorite]

Also take a look at an open-source version of Hershey, mentioned in the post.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:08 PM on February 14 [2 favorites]

Note this post is by Marcin Wichary, a frequent source of the best-of-the-web. He's also responsible for the 2010 Google Pac-Man doodle, and this recreation of a Soviet-era Polish electronic clock, and many other works of love for design and aesthetic. He's a terrific human being too.

(His site seems to be cratering right now. That's an awful lot of images to be loading without some special care to serving infrastructure. If I know Marcin, he'll have it fixed in soon.)
posted by Nelson at 3:12 PM on February 14 [10 favorites]

There is a pantograph-produced nameplate on my desk that I made in shop class. Gorton! It is a very ugly font, especially if you use the default kerning that comes with the letter plates. We were instructed to put them on the machine, with a blank plate used as a literal space. I did so, and was puzzled that nothing happened when I turned on the engraving thingy (a router?). The long-suffering shop instructor gently told me that while the motor rotated the bit, it did not automatically trace the letters. Thus there is a moderate defect in one of the strokes, where I evidently lifted the stylus, as well as a few miniscule wobbles at various junctions and endpoints. For someone who at that point had already been using desktop publishing for several years, it was simulatenously humbling and illuminating.

Site is hugged to death right now, archive.org did work.
posted by wnissen at 4:25 PM on February 14 [4 favorites]

I was wondering if those plastic embossed label makers that were popular when I was a kid were of the Gorton persuasion, but looking at some photos, to my untrained eye, I think not.

What a great great read. I'm a big fan of industrial control panels, so this is right up my alley. Thanks!
posted by chromecow at 4:27 PM on February 14 [3 favorites]

Fantastic read. Thanks for sharing
posted by JoeXIII007 at 4:47 PM on February 14

It’s the Korok of fonts it seems. Just looked around my room and found it. Yahaha!
posted by omegajuice at 5:19 PM on February 14 [3 favorites]

chromecow: someone has suggested there was a "Gorton Digital" that was the basis of the Dymo font?

I have an old school Dymo at home. Back in the day when Twitter was fun, I tweeted a pic of a label I had made, and the official DYMO account faved it. Those were better times. I still use the labeller.

Searching, "Gorton Digital" is a font based on Gorton letter forms, with help from Richard Gorton. And there is an evocative DYMO font.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 5:21 PM on February 14 [4 favorites]

Oh hey, surprise Wisconsin connection! I'll have to do a little more digging into this company.
posted by humbug at 5:40 PM on February 14 [1 favorite]

Heaping on the praise. What a fantastic post. I loved the dawning sense of recognition as he teases out what font he's talking about. "Oh... Oh yeah... OH YEAH, THAT FONT."

It's one of the only things I can think of where I would say "it's very institutional," but mean it in a really good way. Really fascinating set of associations.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 6:00 PM on February 14 [6 favorites]

The background of my smartphone - over at least four phones I think - has been a weird engraved placard I found years ago in an airport.

Today I learned it's in Gorton.
posted by cobaltnine at 7:02 PM on February 14 [4 favorites]

It really was a treat to read this, and gave me a better understanding of how some people obsess over fonts the way I obsess over Star Trek episodes.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:42 PM on February 14 [2 favorites]

You can imagine "watched Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica fighting over the subway signs" as if they really went at it with switchblades in Times Square at 4 AM.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:45 PM on February 14 [2 favorites]

Well that is a crazy cool article...

Who notices differences in fonts? Unless they are obvious like Papyrus?
Glad there are people who notice.
posted by Windopaene at 7:59 PM on February 14

About halfway through it struck me that Gorton is what your writing would look like if you printed really small and very precisely with a bold point ballpoint pen, only with a ballpoint the ball is spinning in the direction of travel instead of perpendicular to it, and the characters are impressed into the surface rather than engraved.
posted by jamjam at 8:48 PM on February 14 [2 favorites]

Correction: The hardest-working font in America is James Brown Extra Bold Italic, most clearly exemplified by the song Kerning in America.
posted by zaixfeep at 9:08 PM on February 14 [6 favorites]

Gorton and Umbra were also popular because, before desktop publishing and press-on letters, you could go to any office supply store or college bookstore and buy green PVC architect's stencil cards (in paper or Tyvek sleeves) with those fonts, along with cards for curves, geometric shapes and computer programming flowchart icons. Back in the day, a set of those cards, a mechanical pencil and a slide rule and you too could be a master of the universe :-)
posted by zaixfeep at 9:27 PM on February 14 [9 favorites]

The hardest-working font in America is James Brown Extra Bold Italic, most clearly exemplified by the song Kerning in America.

Fellas, I'm ready to get up and typeset my thing (Go ahead, go ahead)
I wanna get into it, man, you know (Go ahead)
Like a, like a milling machine, man, (Yeah, go ahead)
Millin' and drillin' it, you know (Yeah)
Can I count it off? (Go 'head)
posted by kirkaracha at 10:18 PM on February 14 [8 favorites]

Ah yeah! A friend of mine inherited a small engraving pantograph and collection of these letters we used to make silly trophies and to personalize woodworking projects. It reminds me of National Park font, which would have been used with a much larger router bit and probably not the pantograph.
posted by St. Oops at 10:50 PM on February 14 [1 favorite]

This was a fantastic read! I love design and looking at typefaces/fonts, and I am definitely going to be on the lookout for Gorton and its relatives now. Thank you for posting this!
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:56 PM on February 14

This is the font I occasionally recognize (on elevator plates and next to water pipes) as "kind of 70s looking." I have no idea why I think it looks kind of 70s looking, except perhaps that I grew up in the late 90s so when I saw something that probably still worked but was obviously dated, it usually came from the 70s.
posted by grandiloquiet at 7:40 AM on February 15 [2 favorites]

Ah, Gorton. The cause of so much discussion on BBC Micro forums as to why its lovely keyboard has ¦ instead of |. And equally much discussion on the Amstrad CPC forums as to why its slightly less lovely keyboard also had a broken bar engraving, but didn't use Gorton.

→ take a look at an open-source version of Hershey, mentioned in the post

You forgot the MeFi's Own™, but I'll let it slide. It's not a very good cut, but it's been used in places, so I'm happy. I've had the files to make a better version sitting on my computer since 2014. Maybe I will someday, but who has the spoons in this economy?

I was all prepared to harrumph at Marcin's article that there was no way that the Hershey fonts were based on Gorton engravings, but I went back to my notes and … yep, those same weird characters in both. Consider the harrumph retracted.

→ an evocative DYMO font.

Made by DYMO themselves and available for free download even, back in the day when grunge typography was a thing. It's a shame there's no clean version.
posted by scruss at 9:15 AM on February 15 [3 favorites]

Mod note: Thanks for this, it's been added to the sidebar and Best Of blog!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 11:08 AM on February 15 [2 favorites]

I can't decide if the story is more fascinating than the article's design, layout, and illustrations or vice versa. The animated font comparisons are particularly helpful and beautiful. I could watch the 2x2 comparison (of TT&H, Gorton, Leroy, and Gorton Modified) that draws each version over outlines of the others all day.

I love engraved Gorton signs and labels as much more than painted/printed letters as I love clicky push buttons more than touch screens. Both seem of an era where things were really made solidly to last.
posted by straight at 11:19 AM on February 15 [3 favorites]

Just sayinʻ -- at the Yale Record mag in the mid-ʻ60's, our go-to Opinionated Man On The Street was, ineluctably perhaps, Mr. Ludlow Fonts.
posted by Droll Lord at 3:54 PM on February 15

See also Routed Gothic.
posted by JonJacky at 8:46 PM on February 15