The hardest working font in Manhattan

To put it in perspective: the font I first assumed was a peer to 1950s Helvetica was already of retirement age the day Helvetica was born. Gorton was older than Gill Sans, Futura, or Johnston’s London Underground font. It was contemporaneous to what today we recognize as the first modern sans serif font, Akzidenz-Grotesk, released but three years b

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A lot of typography has roots in calligraphy – someone holding a brush in their hand and making natural but delicate movements that result in nuanced curves filled with thoughtful interchanges between thin and thick. Most of the fonts you ever saw follow those rules; even the most “mechanical” fonts have surprising humanistic touches if you inspect

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Only in newer keyboards are the letters printed on top of the keys, or charred from their surface by a laser. In older ones – those from the early 1960s laboratory computers, or the 1980s microcomputers – the way every key was constructed was by first molding the letter from plastic of one color, and then grabbing a different plastic and molding th

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