Bell Gothic
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Add type sampleCredits
- Designer(s)
- Chauncey H. Griffith
- Foundry(ies)
- Linotype
- Release Year
- 1938
- Country of Origin
- United States
- Classification
- Sans Serif, Gothic
- Original Format
- Metal (Machine Composition)
- Tags
- 1930s, bell, gothic, grotesk, neo-grotesque, sans, sans-serif
Background
The typeface was commissioned by AT&T as a proprietary typeface for use in telephone directories. Bell Gothic was superseded by Matthew Carter’s typeface Bell Centennial in 1978, the one hundredth anniversary of AT&T’s founding. Bell Gothic remained in uninterrupted use for AT&T telephone directories for forty years. Following AT&T’s adoption of Bell Centennial, the Mergenthaler Linotype foundry licensed Bell Gothic for general use.
Beginning in the early 1990s Bell Gothic became popular and associated with avant garde experimentation with type at places like the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, and RISD. The typeface was used as a display and caption face by Metropolis magazine, by Canadian graphic designer Bruce Mau in designing the initial ZONE book series, Dutch graphic designer Irma Boom, and has been widely used by Semiotext(e) Books, the MIT Press, and Dia Art Foundation.
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