Granby (typeface)

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Granby in medium weight on a specimen sheet. Granby font sample.jpg
Granby in medium weight on a specimen sheet.

Granby is a sans-serif typeface designed and released by the Stephenson Blake type foundry of Sheffield from 1930. [1] [2]

Granby is influenced by a contemporary British sans-serif design, the Johnston typeface or Railway Alphabet (1916), the proprietary face of what became London Underground, and Gill Sans (1928) which had recently been released and become popular. [3] [4] Roy Millington's history of Stephenson Blake also cites Futura as an influence. [5]

Like both Johnston and Gill Sans, Granby has an upper-case influenced by Roman square capitals and a lower-case inspired by traditional "old-style" serif letters, making it an example of what is now called the humanist style of sans-serif fonts. [6] Granby's regular style is a robust design bolder than conventional body text fonts, making it suitable for headings and posters and also for legible text at smaller sizes.

Granby resembles Johnston with diamond-shaped dots (tittles) on the 'i' and 'j' and a wide ‘a’. [7] [8] A difference is its ‘g’, a ‘single-storey’ design influenced by handwriting. According to Mike Ashworth of Transport for London, London Transport itself made some use of Granby by the 1960s due to the limited availability of Johnston type. [9]

Granby Elephant compared to Monotype's Gill Kayo, also called Gill Sans Ultra Bold. Granby Elephant and Gill Kayo or Ultra Bold styles.png
Granby Elephant compared to Monotype's Gill Kayo, also called Gill Sans Ultra Bold.

Several styles of Granby were released to extend the design, including condensed weights, an inlined style [10] and 'Granby Elephant', an ultra-bold design. [11] As with many sans-serifs, rather than a true italic, an oblique was offered, in which the letters were slanted but not altered to take on more handwriting influences.

While never as popular as Gill Sans on the commercial market, Granby nonetheless remained in use with revivals in phototypesetting and digital versions. [7] A digitisation of some weights is sold by Elsner+Flake and Scangraphic; Red Rooster Fonts has also digitised the Elephant style. [11] [12] [13] It was appropriately used in adverts by the London company Granby Cycles in the 1930s. [14]

Wayfarer, by Jeremy Tankard, is a loose revival of the condensed style, commissioned by Sheffield City Council as their corporate font based on its local heritage. [3] [15] [16] (It also has some influences of Stephenson Blake's well-known Grotesque series.) Jeremy Mickel's Specter is a loose adaptation with true italic and an inline version drawn by Douglas Hayes. [4] Dieter Hofrichter's Halifax is also in the same style. [17]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sans-serif</span> Typeface classification for letterforms without serifs

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 serif typefaces. They are often used to convey simplicity and modernity or minimalism. For the purposes of type classification, sans-serif designs are usually divided into these major groups: § Grotesque and § Neo-grotesque, § Geometric, § Humanist and § Other or mixed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Futura (typeface)</span> Geometric sans-serif typeface

Futura is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Paul Renner and released in 1927. It was designed as a contribution on the New Frankfurt-project. It is based on geometric shapes, especially the circle, similar in spirit to the Bauhaus design style of the period. It was developed as a typeface by the Bauer Type Foundry, in competition with Ludwig & Mayer's seminal Erbar typeface of 1926.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gill Sans</span> Humanist sans-serif typeface family developed by Monotype

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Johnston (typeface)</span> Sans-serif typeface

Johnston is a sans-serif typeface designed by and named after Edward Johnston. The typeface was commissioned in 1913 by Frank Pick, commercial manager of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, as part of his plan to strengthen the company's corporate identity. Johnston was originally created for printing, but it rapidly became used for the enamel station signs of the Underground system as well.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Corbel (typeface)</span> Typeface

Corbel is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Jeremy Tankard for Microsoft and released to consumers in 2007. It is part of the ClearType Font Collection, a suite of fonts from various designers released with Windows Vista. All start with the letter C to reflect that they were designed to work well with Microsoft's ClearType text rendering system, a text rendering engine designed to make text clearer to read on LCD monitors. The other fonts in the same group are Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas and Constantia.

Oblique type is a form of type that slants slightly to the right, used for the same purposes as italic type. Unlike italic type, however, it does not use different glyph shapes; it uses the same glyphs as roman type, except slanted. Oblique and italic type are technical terms to distinguish between the two ways of creating slanted font styles; oblique designs may be labelled italic by companies selling fonts or by computer programs. Oblique designs may also be called slanted or sloped roman styles. Oblique fonts, as supplied by a font designer, may be simply slanted, but this is often not the case: many have slight corrections made to them to give curves more consistent widths, so they retain the proportions of counters and the thick-and-thin quality of strokes from the regular design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Impact (typeface)</span> Sans-serif typeface

Impact is a sans-serif typeface in the industrial or grotesk style designed by Geoffrey Lee in 1965 and released by the Stephenson Blake foundry of Sheffield. It is well known for having been included in the core fonts for the Web package and distributed with Microsoft Windows since Windows 98. In the 2010s, it gained popularity for its use in image macros and other internet memes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cheltenham (typeface)</span> 1896 display typeface

Cheltenham is a typeface for display use designed in 1896 by architect Bertram Goodhue and Ingalls Kimball, director of the Cheltenham Press. The original drawings were known as Boston Old Style and were made about 14" high. These drawings were then turned over to Morris Fuller Benton at American Type Founders (ATF) who developed it into a final design. Trial cuttings were made as early as 1899 but the face was not complete until 1902. The face was patented by Kimball in 1904. Later the basic face was spun out into an extensive type family by Morris Fuller Benton.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bank Gothic</span> Typeface

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephenson Blake</span> English engineering company

Stephenson Blake is an engineering company based in Sheffield, England. The company was active from the early 19th century as a type founder, remaining until the 1990s as the last active type foundry in Britain, since when it has diversified into specialist engineering.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Monotype Grotesque</span> Grotesque sans-serif typeface

Monotype Grotesque is a family of sans-serif typefaces released by the Monotype Corporation for its hot metal typesetting system. It belongs to the grotesque or industrial genre of early sans-serif designs. Like many early sans-serifs, it forms a sprawling family designed at different times.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Algerian (typeface)</span> Typeface

Algerian is a decorative serif digital font family, originally produced in the early 20th century by British foundry Stephenson, Blake and Co. The design for the typeface is owned by Linotype, while the name 'Algerian' is a trademark of the International Typeface Corporation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Britannic (typeface)</span> Typeface

Britannic is a sans-serif typeface family that was sold in metal type by Stephenson Blake. It is a "modulated" or stressed sans-serif design, in which the vertical lines are clearly thicker than the horizontals. The Klingspor Museum reports that it was originally created by the Wagner & Schmidt foundry of Leipzig, Germany. In design it is intended for headings, advertisements and signs rather than continuous body text. Stephenson Blake advertised it as "just the right note for an advertising or display panel".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Display typeface</span> Font that is used at large sizes for headings

A display typeface is a typeface that is intended for use in display type at large sizes for titles, headings, pull quotes, and other eye-catching elements, rather than for extended passages of body text.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metro (typeface)</span> Typeface

Metro is a sans-serif typeface family created by William Addison Dwiggins and released by the American Mergenthaler Linotype Company from 1929 onwards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeremy Tankard</span> British type designer

Jeremy Tankard is a British type designer. Tankard has designed retail fonts independently and for FontShop and Adobe. Corbel was designed for Microsoft and has been included in Microsoft Office and Windows since 2006.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bliss (typeface)</span>

Bliss is a humanist sans-serif typeface family designed by Jeremy Tankard.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grotesque (Stephenson Blake typefaces)</span> Family of sans-serif typefaces

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caslon Egyptian</span>

Egyptian is a typeface created by the Caslon foundry of Salisbury Square, London around or probably slightly before 1816, that is the first general-purpose sans-serif typeface in the Latin alphabet known to have been created.

References

  1. ↑ Coles, Stephen. "Questioning Gill Sans". Typographica. Retrieved 18 December 2015.
  2. ↑ "Sense of Place". Eye magazine. Retrieved 31 July 2016.
  3. 1 2 Tankard, Jeremy. "Commissions: Connect Sheffield". Jeremy Tankard Typography. Retrieved 31 July 2016.
  4. 1 2 Mickel, Jeremy. "News: Specter". MKML. Retrieved 18 August 2018.
  5. ↑ Millington, Roy (2002). Stephenson Blake: The Last of the Old English Typefounders. Oak Knoll Press. pp. 170–175. ISBN   1-58456-086-X.
  6. ↑ Tracy, Walter (January 2003). Letters of Credit: A View of Type Design. D.R. Godine. pp. 87–98. ISBN   978-1-56792-240-0.
  7. 1 2 Archer, Ben. "Eric Gill got it wrong; a re-evaluation of Gill Sans". Typotheque. Retrieved 7 January 2011.
  8. ↑ Howes, Justin (2000). Johnston's Underground Type. Harrow Weald, Middlesex: Capital Transport. pp. 73–78. ISBN   1-85414-231-3.
  9. ↑ Ashworth, Mike. "Stephenson Blake of Sheffield, "Granby" typeface page from catalogue, c1960". Flickr . Retrieved 31 July 2016.
  10. ↑ Coles, Stephen. "Granby Inlined". Flickr. Retrieved 2 April 2018. Granby Inlined is an odd duck. The inline does some unusual criss-crossing (B, E, G, T) which can be novel and interesting, but the bowl-to-stem joints (b, d, g, o, q) are quite clumsy. I have yet to see this one in use, except by Catherine Dixon [who] wisely sticks to the caps.
  11. 1 2 Jackaman, Steve; Muir, Ashley. "Granby Elephant RRF". MyFonts. Red Rooster Fonts. Retrieved 15 February 2016.
  12. ↑ "EF Granby". MyFonts . Elsner+Flake . Retrieved 31 July 2016.
  13. ↑ "Granby SB". MyFonts . Scangraphic . Retrieved 31 July 2016.
  14. ↑ "Granby Cycles advertisements". Fonts In Use.
  15. ↑ Bramley, Ellie Violet. "Subliminal power of city fonts". The Guardian . Retrieved 31 July 2016.
  16. ↑ Tankard, Jeremy. "Wayfarer". Jeremy Tankard Typography. Retrieved 31 July 2016. Application of the original Granby Condensed type was, however, difficult practically. It was not available in digital form, and felt to be just too condensed, with the proportion of ascender to x-height, too uncomfortable for use on the signing project. So there arose an opportunity to design a new typeface and at the same time tailor it to the specific needs of the Sheffield project.
  17. ↑ "Halifax". MyFonts . Hoftype. Retrieved 31 July 2016.
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