City is a

slab serif In typography, a slab serif (also called ''mechanistic'', ''square serif'', ''antique'' or ''Egyptian'') typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular ( Rockwell), ...

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 ...

Georg Trump Georg Trump (10 July 1896 – 21 December 1985) was a German graphics, typeface and postage stamp designer, known for designs such as the book typeface Trump Mediaeval (1954), the slab serif City ( 1931) and the condensed, industrial Schadow. Trum ...

and released around 1930 by the

Berthold type foundry H. Berthold AG was one of the largest and most successful type foundries in the world for most of the modern typographic era, making the transition from foundry type to cold type successfully and only coming to dissolution in the digital type er ...

in Berlin, Germany. Though classified as a slab serif, City displays a strong

modernist Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...

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 Roman or Romans most often refers to: *Rome, the capital city of Italy *Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD * Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *'' Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lett ...

and italic. The graphic designer

Jan Tschichold Jan Tschichold (born Johannes Tzschichhold, also known as Iwan Tschichold, or Ivan Tschichold; 2 April 1902 – 11 August 1974) was a German calligraphy, calligrapher, typography, typographer and book designer. He played a significant role ...

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 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 it represents as in a wordm ...

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' and the title 'Southern Television' was co ...

used City for titling in their news programme ''Day by Day.'' * The 1998 anime series '' Cowboy Bebop'' 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 ran from 1967 to 1975 on CBS. It was created by Richard Levinson and William Link, and developed by executive producer Bruce Geller. The title character, Joe Mannix, is a private in ...

''. * For several years until 2015,

ESPN ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). The ...

used City Pro Bold to brand its college football and

basketball Basketball is a team sport in which two teams, most commonly of five players each, opposing one another on a rectangular court, compete with the primary objective of shooting a basketball (approximately in diameter) through the defender's h ...

coverage; ESPN has since used it solely for the latter. *

Italian Air Force , colours = , colours_label = , march = (Ordinance March of the Air Force) by Alberto Di Miniello , mascot = , anniversaries = 28 March ...

(''Aeronautica Militare'') used City Bold typeface for their logo. * Australia's

BBL A barrel is one of several units of volume applied in various contexts; there are dry barrels, fluid barrels (such as the U.K. beer barrel and U.S. beer barrel), oil barrels, and so forth. For historical reasons the volumes of some barrel units ...

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 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: Greece 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 ...

and Cyrillic.

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 {{typ-stub

Commercial uses

City Pro

Square Slabserif 711

See also

References

External links