Grotesque (Stephenson Blake typefaces)
Family of sans-serif typefaces / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Stephenson Blake Grotesque fonts are a series of sans-serif typefaces created by the type foundry Stephenson Blake of Sheffield, England, mostly around the beginning of the twentieth century.[1]
Stephenson Blake's grotesque faces are in the traditional nineteenth-century "grotesque" style of sans-serif,[2] with folded-up letterforms and a solid structure not intended for extended body text.[3] 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 descenders and considerable variation in stroke width, creating a somewhat eccentric, irregular impression.[4][5][6]
Much less even in colour than later families like Univers and Helvetica, 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.[7][8][9] 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."[10] Jeremy Tankard has described them as the "most idiosyncratic of designs".[11] Not all versions have been digitised.