The Stephenson Blake Grotesque fonts are a series of

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 s ...

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...

s created by the

type foundry A type foundry is a company that designs or distributes typefaces. Before digital typography, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces for hand typesetting, and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and M ...

Stephenson Blake Stephenson Blake is an engineering company based in Sheffield, England. The company was active from the early 19th century as a type founder, remaining until the 1990s as the last active type foundry in Britain, since when it has diversified in ...

Sheffield Sheffield is a city in South Yorkshire, England, whose name derives from the River Sheaf which runs through it. The city serves as the administrative centre of the City of Sheffield. It is historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...

, mostly around the beginning of the twentieth century. Stephenson Blake's grotesque faces are in the traditional nineteenth-century "grotesque" style of sans-serif, with folded-up letterforms and a solid structure not intended for extended body text. Forming a sprawling series, they include several unusual details, such as an 'r' with a droop, a bruised-looking 'G' and 'C' with inward curls on the right, very short

descender In typography and handwriting, a descender is the portion of a letter that extends below the baseline of a font. For example, in the letter ''y'', the descender is the "tail", or that portion of the diagonal line which lies below the ''v' ...

s and considerable variation in stroke width, creating a somewhat eccentric, irregular impression. Much less even in

colour Color (American English) or colour (British English) is the visual perceptual property deriving from the spectrum of light interacting with the photoreceptor cells of the eyes. Color categories and physical specifications of color are associ ...

than later families like Univers and

Helvetica Helvetica (originally Neue Haas Grotesk) is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the famous 19th century (1890s) ...

, they were very commonly used in British commercial printing in the metal type era, with a revival of interest as part of a resurgence of use of such "industrial" sans-serifs around the 1950s. Writing in ''The Typography of Press Advertisement'' (1956), printer Kenneth Day commented that the family "has a personality sometimes lacking in the condensed forms of the contemporary sans cuttings of the last thirty years." Jeremy Tankard has described them as the "most idiosyncratic of designs". Not all versions have been digitised.

Family

Grotesque № 9 Type Specimen (7982813165)

The family of typefaces was sold by number rather than using weight names. Commonly used numbers included: * Grotesque No. 5 – condensed * Grotesque No. 6 – wide * Grotesque No. 7 – (shown on specimen, above) light condensed * Grotesque No. 8 – wide, bold. * Grotesque No. 9 – (shown on specimen, above) condensed, bold. Dated to 1906 by Hutchings, it was particularly popular and an

oblique Oblique may refer to: * an alternative name for the character usually called a slash (punctuation) ( / ) *Oblique angle, in geometry *Oblique triangle, in geometry * Oblique lattice, in geometry * Oblique leaf base, a characteristic shape of the b ...

was later added in 1949. It has been digitised. * Grotesque No. 10 – regular weight and width. * Grotesque No. 66 – wide Stephenson Blake also used the terms "Condensed" and "Elongated Sans Serif" in some cases. A particularly popular member of the family is Grotesque No. 9, a bold condensed weight, and its companion oblique. Early users of "Grot No. 9" include

Wyndham Lewis Percy Wyndham Lewis (18 November 1882 – 7 March 1957) was a British writer, painter and critic. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited ''BLAST,'' the literary magazine of the Vorticists. His novels include ''Tarr'' ( ...

's 1914 avant-garde magazine ''

Blast Blast or The Blast may refer to: *Explosion, a rapid increase in volume and release of energy in an extreme manner *Detonation, an exothermic front accelerating through a medium that eventually drives a shock front Film * ''Blast'' (1997 film), ...

''. It returned to popularity from the 1940s, and an oblique was added in 1949. Colin Banks' 1986 obituary of compositor and advertising designer Bill Morgan credits him and business partner Leon French with the face's revival: "Morgan and French had met doing Ministry of Information propaganda at the London Press Exchange. They had bullied and paid Stephenson Blake, the typefounders, to recall Grot no 9 from historic retirement as they had perceived it as the most economical and powerful letter to exploit the wartime restriction on advertising space." Other designers who liked it included

Allen Hutt George Allen Hutt (1901–1973) was a British journalist, editor, newspaper designer and Communist and trade union activist. Life Hutt came from a family of printers, while his mother Marion was a headmistress. He attended Kilburn Grammar School ...

, who described it in ''Newspaper Design'' (1960) as "the best of all Medium Sans, the famous Grotesque No. 9" Grotesque No. 9 reached

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

and

Letraset Letraset was a company known mainly for manufacturing sheets of typefaces and other artwork elements using the dry transfer method. Letraset has been acquired by the Colart group and become part of its subsidiary Winsor & Newton. Corporate his ...

dry transfer lettering and, unlike many of the other Stephenson Blake Grotesques, has been digitised in several releases. In the United States Roger Black, a prominent publication designer, discovered it in 1972 from a Visual Graphics Corporation phototypesetting catalogue, and came to like it. He used it for designing ''

Newsweek ''Newsweek'' is an American weekly online news magazine co-owned 50 percent each by Dev Pragad, its president and CEO, and Johnathan Davis (businessman), Johnathan Davis, who has no operational role at ''Newsweek''. Founded as a weekly print m ...

'', commissioning a custom digitisation from Jim Parkinson, later released commercially. Font Bureau, the digital typeface design studio he co-founded in 1989, also issued Bureau Grotesque, an adaptation of the whole Grotesque family with a large range of styles, co-designed by the company's other co-founder David Berlow. Other users have included ''Q'' magazine. The Stephenson Blake Grotesques should not be confused with the first sans-serif font ever made, the capitals-only

Caslon Egyptian Egyptian is a typeface created by the Caslon foundry of Salisbury Square, London around or probably slightly before 1816, that is the first general-purpose sans-serif typeface in the Latin alphabet known to have been created. Historical backgrou ...

of c. 1816 which Stephenson Blake sold, which was a quite separate design.

Related fonts

Similar designs include in the metal type period: *

Miller and Richard Miller & Richard was a type foundry based in Edinburgh that designed and manufactured metal type. It operated from 1809 to 1952. The foundry was established by William Miller. He had been works manager of the foundry established by Alexander W ...

's similar grotesque family * Monotype Grotesque–another large family of trade sans-serifs from the British Monotype Corporation * Headline Bold or Series 595, Monotype's clone of No. 9 with oblique, upright weight digitised. Digital period: * "Bureau Grotesque" family from Font Bureau, a loose digital adaptation. * Balboa is Jim Parkinson's digitisation, expanded from his digitisation for ''

'', originally called "Newsweek No. 9". It includes a shaded weight. * Kilburn by Adrian Talbot, a digital family inspired by the condensed styles. * Sporting Grotesque, a wide open-source family by Lucas Le Bihan loosely inspired by Grotesque No. 6. * Work Sans by Wei Huang, loosely based on Grotesque No. 10 and other wider sans-serifs from the period adapted for onscreen display. The modern corporate font of Sheffield, Wayfarer designed by Jeremy Tankard, is designed with some influences of the Stephenson Blake Grotesque series but predominantly based on their unrelated sans-serif Granby.

References

{{notelist, 30em

Family

Related fonts

References

External links