Font Plague: Century Gothic

Used to be that Designers set typographic trends. A spanky new typeface would be released by some hot shot type foundry and, with enough universal appeal, and despite the cost, that typeface would spread like wildfire, pricking the public consciousness and giving a new language to entities the world over. It happened with Meta, Insterstate, Akkurat and, back through the mists of time, with Helvetica, Futura, Gill Sans, Garamond etc.
 
Now, with ‘personal computing’ and the online environment making the creative world more democratic, we’re staring to see loads of design decisions made by ‘non-designers’. It’s all part and parcel of the rise of the amateur, something Boicozine doesn’t think of as necessarily a bad thing (boicozine is the product of both amateur journalism and amateur web design). Having said that this ‘rise of the amateur’ bodes ill for typography. Type is often the most expressive aspect of a graphic design. The appropriate choice of typeface will set the tone for your communication straight away.
 
If design is decision making then deciding on the most appropriate typeface for a project is the most vital skill a graphic designer can master. Still, it’s a skill that the amateur often overlooks for reasons of accessibility. Think about it… you’ve never designed anything before and you’re setting a page of text. You have a choice to use what’s preloaded on your computer or to go dive head-first into the vast cacophony of typefaces that are available, on a scale from free to the most expensive you can find (House Industries attempted to create the most expensive typeface family in the world with their ‘Luxury’ family [houseind.com] although the debate rages on [typophile.com]).
 
So it was that Arial came to prominence. The poor bastard child of Helvetica, it was produced to get around having to pay to license the real thing. It’s Helvetica with crappy bits thrown in to avoid any law suits. Of course, it been with us long enough now for a certain mystique to have developed around it, helped by the rise of Ascender Corp [ascendercorp.com], who were born out of the ashes of Microsoft’s typography division [microsoft.com/typography] clutching a swag of valuable font licenses and continue to hold sway over of computer operating systems the world over. Which brings me neatly round to Century Gothic.
 
Century Gothic is freakin’ everywhere at the moment from M&S ‘Connoisseur’ packaging, to the Casino Royale to PC World’s recent rebrand to the City of London’s collateral and so on. It is essentially Futura or Avant Garde with crappy bits thrown in to avoid licensing costs… again. Only this time around Ascender have learnt from criticism levelled at Arial (which they continue to naively contest) and imbued it with an historical context, basing the design, very loosely, on a typeface developed around the 1940s by little known typographer, Sol Hess [linotype.com]. Their choice to ‘work-up’ a Monotype typeface is ripe too. Monotype have reproduced and renamed a number of replicant typefaces throughout their often dubious history.
 
So fellow amateur enthusiasts (in whatever field you may frequent) next time you’re scrolling through your typeface menu and are about to reach for the Century Gothic (cause everyone’s doing Arial) just remember this… there are gabillions of typefaces in the world, far too many to count and, although it may seem easier to work with what you’ve got, it was Ascender who also thrust upon the world the most reviled font in existence, Comic Sans [bancomicsans.com], and they’re still flogging it today (for $30 a pop) [ascenderfonts.com].