 | |
| Category | Sans-serif |
|---|---|
| Classification | Grotesque sans-serif |
| Designer(s) | Frank Hinman Pierpont |
| Foundry | Monotype Corporation |
| Date released | 1926 |
| Re-issuing foundries | Stephenson Blake, Adobe Type, Linotype |
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.[1][2]
The family was popular in British trade printing, especially its series 215 and 216 regular and bold weights from around 1926, which have been credited to its American-born engineering manager Frank Hinman Pierpont. Several weights have been digitised.
- ^ Handover, Phyllis Margaret (1958). "Grotesque Letters". Monotype Newsletter, Also Printed in Motif as "Letters Without Serifs".
- ^ Hoefler, Jonathan; Frere-Jones, Tobias. "Knockout". Hoefler & Co. Retrieved 21 October 2017.
The notion of the "type family" is so central to typography that it's easy to forget how recent an invention it is. Throughout most of its history, typography simply evolved the forms that were the most useful and the most interesting, generally with indifference toward how they related to one another. Italic faces existed for decades before they were considered as companions for romans, just as poster types shouted in a range of emphatic tones before they were reimagined as "bold" or "condensed" cousins. The notion that a type family should be planned from the outset is a Modernist concoction, and it's one that type designers have lived with for less than a century…For more than a century before Helvetica, the sans serif landscape was dominated by unrelated designs.