Thursday, November 11, 2010

Wilson - Trade Gothic

Trade Gothic was first cut by Jackson Burke in 1948. Jackson Burke continued working on creating more weights and styles up until 1960. Jackson Burke designed the Trade Gothic font for Mergenthaler Linotype, which was the company that Jackson Burke was the Director of Typographic Development at from 1949 to 1963. Trade Gothic is a trademark of the Linotype Corporation because of this reason. Trade Gothic is one of Linotype’s best selling fonts. Like other fonts that use the nineteenth century grotesque style, Trade Gothic has a large x-height. The x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the median, often times the height of the letter x. Also, because of Trade Gothic’s condensed faces, it is often a classic font used for designs on headlines and sub-heading for newspapers, magazines, and classified advertisements. Many designers consider Trade Gothic a great no-nonsense typeface making is perfect for headers. Trade Gothic is often matched up with antiqua and/or roman text fonts to contrast Trade Gothic’s almost serious personality. Trade Gothic does not display much unifying form structure within it’s family of fonts, like other popular sans serif font families (like Futura, Helvetica, Univers, and many others), but this difference adds to its multiple uses and contributes towards today’s trend of types which are, or at least seem to be, hand worked or naturalistic. Trade Gothic is often used in many multimedia and advertisements needs because of Trade Gothic’s versatility and appeal. Trade Gothic has become one of my personal favorite typefaces. Because of Trade Gothic being such a versatile family of fonts it is quite easy to use with advertisements and headlines for newspapers and magazines. One of the most important aspects of Trade Gothic is how various the different fonts within the family are from each other.

Jackson Burke was an American typeface and book designer. He studied design at the University of California, Berkeley. After school, he became the Director of Typographic Development at Mergenthaler Linotype. He had this position from 1949 to 1963. While working at Mergenthaler Linotype, Burke was responsible for development of fonts for use with Native American languages, and the TeleTypesetting System for magazine uses. Along with creating the Trade Gothic typeface, Burke worked on the Majestic and Aurora typefaces.

Concept: I have had some problems with coming up with a good concept to use with this typeface, but I think I will go with trying to make the booklet appear like a newspaper. Be using the bold condensed fonts for the titles like in a newspaper and a light standard font for the body copy, I believe I will be able to give a front page of a newspaper look to my type book. Any help I can get with my concept I would greatly appreciate though.

1 comment:

  1. Steven, good bio and research. Newspaper concept is good. Try to think of clever headlines to both mimic the newspaper style while supporting the content inside ex. "Burke Develops New Typeface" or something more clever. Consider the newspaper column structure. It may be difficulty to do several columns considering our small format. Also, look at newspapers from that time period. Even better if you can find one that uses the typeface. Consider the different sections of the newspaper and how that may be utilized to organize your content.

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