Berthold Block is a

sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif (), gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than ...

typeface released by the H. Berthold

foundry A foundry is a factory that produces metal castings. Metals are cast into shapes by melting them into a liquid, pouring the metal into a mold, and removing the mold material after the metal has solidified as it cools. The most common metals pr ...

in the early twentieth century and intended for display use. Block has a chunky design suitable for headings, with short descenders allowing tight linespacing and rounded corners. It is sometimes simply called "Block". Font design expert Stephen Coles describes it as "a soft but substantial display face with compact dimensions and an organic appearance… tisn’t meant for body copy." The

Klingspor Museum The Klingspor-Museum is a museum in Offenbach, Germany, specializing in the art of modern book production, typography and type. It includes a collection of fine art books from Karl Klingspor, one of the owners of Klingspor Type Foundry in Off ...

credits it to Hermann Hoffmann, who managed type design for Berthold. The original metal type release of Block was intentionally "distressed" in style, matching the effect of worn type; some re-releases have a cleaner design. Ferdinand Ulrich suggests that this was to match the organic feel of advertising lettering of the time, including the work of

Lucian Bernhard Lucian Bernhard (born Emil Kahn, March 15, 1883 – May 29, 1972) was a German graphic designer, type designer, professor, interior designer, and artist during the first half of the twentieth century. Career Bernhard was influential in hel ...

. Block was one of Berthold's most popular typefaces, and was released in a wide range of versions, including lighter weights and type in wood (for large sizes). Metal type versions had

stylistic alternate In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a ''typeface'', defined as the set of fonts that share an overall design. For instance, the typeface Bauer Bodoni (shown in the figure) includes fonts "Roman" (or "regular" ...

characters such as a more compact 'S' to allow fine-tuning of appearance of type and fit the desired number of characters into a line.

History

Berthold Block was released in 1908; Berthold later added additional weights and styles, also releasing

phototypesetting Phototypesetting is a method of Typesetting, setting type which uses photography to make columns of Sort (typesetting), type on a scroll of photographic paper. It has been made obsolete by the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publ ...

versions. Berthold also used the name "Block" for a number of other typefaces not particularly closely related to it as a

brand extension Brand extension or brand stretching is a marketing strategy in which a firm marketing a product with a well-developed image uses the same brand name in a different product category. The new product is called a spin-off. Organizations use this ...

marketing strategy. These included the script font "Block-Signal" and the

blackletter Blackletter (sometimes black letter or black-letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule or Gothic type, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for ...

Block-Fraktur. Block continued to be popular in the

period; Jens Gehlhaar comments that "with roughened outlines and in bold weights, it was never a candidate for timelessness, but its big x-height and tight fit made it quite popular in 1970s Germany and England." It was often used by

Praktiker Praktiker AG was a German hardware store chain which operated in Europe. It was based in Hamburg and opened its first store in 1978 in Luxembourg under the name bâtiself. Initially owned by ASKO, the chain became a division of Metro AG afte ...

and by the

Whitechapel Art Gallery The Whitechapel Gallery is a public art gallery in Whitechapel on the north side of Whitechapel High Street, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The original building, designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, opened in 1901 as one of the fir ...

for branding in the 1970s and 80s. In the late 1970s, Berthold re-released three lighter-weight fonts derived from the Block design as a mini-family named "Berliner Grotesk" for phototypesetting, with the font redraw carried out by

Erik Spiekermann Erik Spiekermann (born 30 May 1947) is a German typographer, designer and writer. He is an honorary professor at the University of the Arts Bremen and ArtCenter College of Design. Biography Spiekermann studied art history at Berlin's Free Uni ...

Digitisations

A variety of digitisations of Block exist, including by Berthold and successor companies and by

Bitstream A bitstream (or bit stream), also known as binary sequence, is a sequence of bits. A bytestream is a sequence of bytes. Typically, each byte is an 8-bit quantity, and so the term octet stream is sometimes used interchangeably. An octet may ...

(the condensed weight only). Paratype of Moscow released an expansion with Cyrillic characters in 1997.

Matthew Butterick Matthew Coffin Butterick (born November 15, 1970) is an American typographer, lawyer, writer, and computer programmer. He received the 2012 Golden Pen Award from the Legal Writing Institute for his book ''Typography for Lawyers'', which started ...

's Hermes, first released by Font Bureau and later self-released, is a loose adaptation also inspired by other German

grotesque Since at least the 18th century (in French and German, as well as English), grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus ...

typefaces of the period, adding lighter weights and unicase features.

References

{{notelist, 30em

External links

1921 Berthold Block specimen
(digitisation: Stephen Coles)
Fonts In Use
Sans-serif typefaces Display typefaces Berthold typefaces