Grotesque (Stephenson Blake typefaces)

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Grotesque
File:Grotesque No 9.png
CategorySans-serif
ClassificationGrotesque
FoundryStephenson Blake
Date created1906–1949

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.

Family

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File:Grotesque No. 8 Type Specimen (8241109617).jpg
Grotesque No. 8 on a metal type specimen sheet
File:Grotesque № 9 Type Specimen (7982813165).jpg
Grotesque No. 9 on a metal type specimen sheet

The family of typefaces was sold by number rather than using weight names. Commonly used numbers included:

  • Grotesque No. 5 – condensed
  • Grotesque No. 6 – wide[12]
  • Grotesque No. 7 – (shown on specimen, above) light condensed
  • Grotesque No. 8 – wide, bold.[12]
  • Grotesque No. 9 – (shown on specimen, above) condensed, bold. Dated to 1906 by Hutchings,[13] it was particularly popular and an oblique was later added in 1949.[13][14] It has been digitised.[4][15][16]
  • Grotesque No. 10 – regular weight and width.[17]
  • Grotesque No. 66 – wide[18]

Stephenson Blake also used the terms "Condensed" and "Elongated Sans Serif" in some cases.

A particularly popular member of the family is Grotesque No. 9, a bold condensed weight, and its companion oblique.[19] Early users of "Grot No. 9" include Wyndham Lewis's 1914 avant-garde magazine Blast.[20][21][22][23][24] It returned to popularity from the 1940s, and an oblique was added in 1949.[14] Colin Banks' 1986 obituary of compositor and advertising designer Bill Morgan credits him and business partner Leon French with the face's revival: "Morgan and French had met doing Ministry of Information propaganda at the London Press Exchange. They had bullied and paid Stephenson Blake, the typefounders, to recall Grot no 9 from historic retirement as they had perceived it as the most economical and powerful letter to exploit the wartime restriction on advertising space."[25] Other designers who liked it included Allen Hutt, who described it in Newspaper Design (1960) as "the best of all Medium Sans, the famous Grotesque No. 9".[26] Grotesque No. 9 reached phototypesetting and Letraset dry transfer lettering and, unlike many of the other Stephenson Blake Grotesques, has been digitised in several releases.[27]

In the United States Roger Black, a prominent publication designer, discovered it in 1972 from a Visual Graphics Corporation phototypesetting catalogue, and came to like it.[4] He used it for designing Newsweek, commissioning a bolder custom redesign from Jim Parkinson.[4][28][29] Font Bureau, the digital typeface design studio he co-founded in 1989, also issued Bureau Grotesque, an adaptation of the whole Grotesque family with a large range of styles, co-designed by the company's other co-founder David Berlow.[4][30][31] Other users have included Q magazine.[32]

The Stephenson Blake Grotesques should not be confused with the first sans-serif font ever made, the capitals-only Caslon Egyptian of c. 1816 which Stephenson Blake sold, which was a quite separate design.

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File:BlastFirst.jpg
The first section of Wyndham Lewis' Manifesto, Blast 1, 1914, in Grotesque No. 9
File:Right time holiday in Jersey.jpg
Grotesque No. 9 on a poster for Jersey

Similar designs include in the metal type period:

  • Miller and Richard's similar grotesque family[33]
  • Monotype Grotesque–another large family of trade sans-serifs from the British Monotype Corporation
  • Headline Bold or Series 595, Monotype's clone of No. 9 with oblique, upright weight digitised.[26][34]
  • The Caslon Type Foundry's Doric family and other related sans-serifs, although these lack some of the Stephenson Blake family's quirkier details[35]

Digital period:

  • "Bureau Grotesque" family from Font Bureau, a loose digital adaptation.[30][36][31]
  • Balboa by Jim Parkinson with vertical sides on the capitals and a shaded weight, inspired by his design for Newsweek but also by a wood type used by the San Francisco Chronicle, and his related design ITC Roswell.[4][28][29][37]
  • Kilburn by Adrian Talbot, a digital family inspired by the condensed styles.[38][39]
  • Sporting Grotesque, a wide open-source family by Lucas Le Bihan loosely inspired by Grotesque No. 6.[40][41]
  • Work Sans by Wei Huang, loosely based on Grotesque No. 10 and other wider sans-serifs from the period, adapted for onscreen display.[42]
  • Caslon Doric, a digital adaptation of the Caslon Foundry sans-serifs by Paul Barnes and Tim Ripper at Commercial Type[35][43]

The modern corporate font of Sheffield, Wayfarer designed by Jeremy Tankard, is designed with some influences of the Stephenson Blake Grotesque series but predominantly based on their unrelated sans-serif Granby.[44][45][11]

References

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