City is a
slab serif typeface
A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...
designed by
Georg Trump and released around 1930 by the
Berthold type foundry
H. Berthold AG was one of the largest and most successful type foundry, type foundries in the world for most of the modern typography, typographic era, making the transition from Movable type, foundry type to cold type successfully and only comin ...
in Berlin, Germany. Though classified as a slab serif, City displays a strong
modernist
Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...
influence in its geometric structure of right angles and opposing round corners. The typeface takes inspiration from the machine age, and industry. A consistent application of repeated parts: an outer circle softening interior rectilinear spaces, results in a highly unified and refined typeface.
The lowercase a is composed of a two horizontal rectangles in the interior, the outer skin follows the counter but always contrasting the outer stroke with the organic curves. The face was produced in three weights: light, medium, and bold, each in
roman and
italic. The graphic designer
Jan Tschichold
Jan Tschichold (; born Johannes Tzschichhold; 2 April 1902 – 11 August 1974), also known as Iwan Tschichold or Ivan Tschichold, was a German calligrapher, typographer and book designer. He played a significant role in the development o ...
helped to popularize the City typeface by his use of it for his book ''Typographische Gestaltung'' published by the Basel publishing house Benno Schwabe & Co.
Commercial uses
*
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
Corporation used variations of City for their corporate
logo
A logo (abbreviation of logotype; ) is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name that it represents, as in ...
from 1956 onward and used City Medium on the title pages and covers of their technical manuals for several decades.
*
Southern Television
Southern Television was the ITV broadcasting licence holder for the South and South-East of England from 30 August 1958 to 31 December 1981. The company was launched as Southern Television Limited. However, in 1966, during the application pr ...
used City for titling in their news programme ''Day by Day.''
* The 1998 anime series ''
Cowboy Bebop
is a 1998 Japanese neo-noir space Western anime television series that aired on TV Tokyo and Wowow from 1998 to 1999. It was created and animated by Sunrise (company), Sunrise, led by a production team of director Shinichirō Watanabe, ...
'' used City for its title sequence.
* A variant of this typeface was also used for the titles and credits of the
CBS crime drama series, ''
Mannix
''Mannix'' is an American detective television series that originally aired for eight seasons on CBS from September 16, 1967, to March 13, 1975. The show was created by Richard Levinson and William Link, and developed by executive producer ...
''.
* For several years until 2015,
ESPN
ESPN (an initialism of their original name, which was the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by the Walt Disney Company (80% and operational control) and Hearst Commu ...
used City Pro Bold to brand its college
football
Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kick (football), kicking a football (ball), ball to score a goal (sports), goal. Unqualified, football (word), the word ''football'' generally means the form of football t ...
and
basketball
Basketball is a team sport in which two teams, most commonly of five players each, opposing one another on a rectangular Basketball court, court, compete with the primary objective of #Shooting, shooting a basketball (ball), basketball (appro ...
coverage; ESPN has since used it solely for the latter.
*
Italian Air Force (''Aeronautica Militare'') used City Bold typeface for their logo.
* Australia's
BBL and
WBBL T20 Cricket Tournaments used City for their branding up until 2019. The font is still used in the tournaments' logo.
City Pro
In 2007–09, Berthold released an OpenType Pro version of City called City Pro, which supports Central European, Latin Extended A characters. OpenType features include ordinals, proportional lining figures, subscripts and superscripts, fractions.
Square Slabserif 711
The Square Slabserif 711 font from Bitstream is very similar to City and is available in light, medium, and bold weights. The Square Slabserif 711 also support
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...
and
Cyrillic
The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...
.
See also
*
Cholla Slab
References
*Blackwell, Lewis. ''20th Century Type.'' Yale University Press: 2004. .
*Fiedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. ''Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History.'' Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. .
*Macmillan, Neil. ''An A–Z of Type Designers.'' Yale University Press: 2006. .
*Meggs, Philip and Rob Carter. ''Typographic Specimens: The Great Typefaces.'' Van Nostrand Reinhold: 1993. .
External links
Berthold Fonts: City Pro OpenType
Berthold typefaces
Letterpress typefaces
Photocomposition typefaces
Digital typefaces
Typefaces designed by Georg Trump
Geometric slab-serif typefaces
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