Impact 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 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, ...

in the industrial or grotesque style designed by Geoffrey Lee in 1965 and released by the Stephenson Blake foundry of

Sheffield Sheffield is a city in South Yorkshire, England, situated south of Leeds and east of Manchester. The city is the administrative centre of the City of Sheffield. It is historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire and some of its so ...

. It is well known for having been included in the

core fonts for the Web Core fonts for the Web was a project started by Microsoft in 1996 to create a standard pack of fonts for the World Wide Web. It included the proprietary software, proprietary fonts Andalé Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans, Comic Sans MS, Cour ...

package and distributed with

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

since

Windows 98 Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was the second operating system in the 9x line, as the successor to Windows 95. It was Software ...

. In the 2010s, it gained popularity for its use in image macros and other

internet meme An Internet meme, or meme (, Help:Pronunciation respelling key, ''MEEM''), is a cultural item (such as an idea, behavior, or style) that spreads across the Internet, primarily through Social media, social media platforms. Internet memes manif ...

s. Previously, video game franchise ''

Call of Duty ''Call of Duty'' is a first-person shooter military video game series and media franchise published by Activision, starting in 2003. The games were first developed by Infinity Ward, then by Treyarch and Sledgehammer Games. Several spin-of ...

'' used Impact typeface for their logotype until June 2023.

Design

Lee was an advertising design director and designed Impact with posters and publicity material in mind. Its thick strokes, compressed letterspacing, and minimal interior counterform are specifically aimed, as its name suggests, to "have an impact". Impact has a high

x-height upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the le ...

, reaching nearly to three-quarters the capital line. Ascenders are short, and descenders even shorter. With narrow apertures and folded-up letterforms, the lower-case can be quite hard to read printed small, especially for people with vision problems. The face is intended for headlines and display use rather than body text. As a display design, it was not released with an italic or bold weight. During the 1960s, there was a trend towards condensed, bold, "industrial" sans-serifs like Schmalfette Grotesk and Compacta, largely pioneered by

West German West Germany was the common English name for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from its formation on 23 May 1949 until its reunification with East Germany on 3 October 1990. It is sometimes known as the Bonn Republic after its capital c ...

magazine ''

Twen ''Twen'' was a West German magazine that was published from 1959 to 1971, and known for its innovative design and typography. History and profile ''Twen'' was launched in 1959 as a bimonthly magazine and the first issue appeared in April 1959. ...

'', and Impact was intended to fit this trend. Writing in 2004, the year before his death, Lee explained that the design goal was "to get as much ink on paper as possible in a given size with the maximum possible x-height" and to provide a home-grown metal type alternative to European designs in the style (e.g. Schmalfette Grotesk, illustrated in ''Lettera'', a contemporary anthology series of lettering), which were complicated for British businesses to license and use. Lee wrote that "many of us admired the vitality and colour of what we knew only as Schmalfette, and used it by old-fashioned cut and paste. Use was limited as it was never made in metal as far as I know, and existed then in capitals and numerals only". (Schmalfette Grotesk was later digitised, with an added lower-case, as Haettenschweiler by Eraman Ltd.) Other designs along the same lines from around the same period included the

Letraset Letraset was a company known mainly for manufacturing sheets of typefaces and other artwork elements using the dry-transfer lettering method. Letraset was acquired by the Colart group and became part of its subsidiary Winsor & Newton. C ...

face Compacta,

Matthew Carter Matthew Carter (born 1 October 1937) is an English type designer.A Man of Letters

's slightly earlier masthead of ''

Private Eye ''Private Eye'' is a British fortnightly satirical and current affairs (news format), current affairs news magazine, founded in 1961. It is published in London and has been edited by Ian Hislop since 1986. The publication is widely recognised ...

'' (which is caps-only but based on a never-released typeface with a lower case), and the phototypesetting Helvetica Compressed, also by Carter and released a few years later.

Release

Released at the end of the age of

metal type In physical typesetting, a sort or type is a block with a typographic character etched on it, used—when lined up with others—to print text. In movable-type printing, the sort or type is cast from a matrix mold and assembled by hand wit ...

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 ...

gained popularity, it was one of Stephenson Blake's last typefaces released in metal. The design rights were acquired by

Monotype Monotyping is a type of printmaking made by drawing or painting on a smooth, non-absorbent surface. The surface, or matrix, was historically a copper etching plate, but in contemporary work it can vary from zinc or glass to acrylic glass. The ...

, which ultimately licensed the design to Microsoft as part of a package of fonts for use with Windows in the 1980s and 1990s. The original design contained wider alternate forms for the letters 'J' and 'r', intended for letter positions at the start and end of words, which have generally not been included in digitisations. The common digitisation also simplifies the design somewhat, omitting the subtle bevelling of

tittle The tittle or superscript dot is the dot on top of lowercase ''i'' and ''j''. In English writing the tittle is a diacritic which only appears as part of these glyphs, but diacritic dots can appear over other letters in various languages. In mos ...

s on 'i' and 'j' and flared stroke ends seen on the original metal type release. An eccentricity preserved in the digitisation is the

ampersand The ampersand, also known as the and sign, is the logogram , representing the grammatical conjunction, conjunction "and". It originated as a typographic ligature, ligature of the letters of the word (Latin for "and"). Etymology Tradi ...

, which is only as high as the x-height, not the cap height. Lee digitised and self-released a variant, Impact Wide, in 2002 for online sale. This release includes the alternate characters and an italic style. In July 2010, Ascender Corp introduced Impact 2010, an enhanced version with additional

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. Derived from TrueType, it retains TrueType's basic structure but adds many intricate data structures for describing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corpora ...

typographic features designed by Terrance Weinzierl and

Steve Matteson Steven R. Matteson (born 1965) is an American typeface designer whose work is included in several computer operating systems and embedded in game consoles, cell phones and other electronic devices. He is the designer of the Microsoft font family ...

. These included quirky interlocking characters,

text figures Text figures (also known as non-lining, lowercase, old style, ranging, hanging, medieval, billing, or antique figures or numerals) are numerals designed with varying heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text, hence the ...

and proportional and tabular figures.

References

External links

* Original Impact brochure "The Impact of Impact": page
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Impact (Typeface) Grotesque sans-serif typefaces Neo-grotesque sans-serif typefaces Windows XP typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1965 Display typefaces Stephenson Blake typefaces Internet memes

Design

Release

See also

References

External links