In the early 1900s, Morris Fuller Benton began to create the type designs that would impact American Type Founders, and American type design in general, for over forty years. Globe Gothic was his first design, which was followed by Alternate Gothic. In 1902, ITC Franklin Gothic was cut.
At first only a Roman was released, but additional variants were added as ITC Franklin Gothic became popular. A condensed design was drawn in 1905, and an extra condensed in 1906. Five years later Benton added an italic to the family, and two years after that a shaded font was offered. This was the final Benton addition to the ITC Franklin Gothic series.
Franklin Takes a Back Seat
By the mid-1920s, ATF offered more than fifty sans serif type styles. But design trends ebb and flow, and the popularity of designs like ITC Franklin Gothic was eclipsed by other faces, such as Cheltenham, Garamond, Bodoni, and the works of Fred Goudy. Sans serifs typefaces became popular again in the 1930s, but now it was geometric sans serif styles like Futura, Spartan, and Kabel that thrived, not the earlier designs (which came to be known as “19th century grotesques”).
It wasn’t till the early 1950s that revived gothics again became the style of choice among designers and art directors. However, the old gothic families were not complete enough for the typography of the 50s, and stroke weight changes in the characters were not subtle enough. Designers were looking for sleek, orderly designs, which the older gothics clearly were not.
European type foundries were the first to answer the changing needs of designers with sans serif families like Univers and Helvetica. These logical, controlled, and relatively conservative designs soon pushed faces like ITC Franklin Gothic into typographic oblivion.
ITC Offers a Revival
In 1980, ITC revived ITC Franklin Gothic in a new interpretation. The redesign was intended to offer a reasonable alternative to Helvetica and its myriad lookalikes. ITC Franklin Gothic offered a slight increase in x-height and character width to distinguish it from Benton’s design, as well as a somewhat condensed lowercase a-z alphabet. The result was a modern sans serif that still possessed the slightly quirky personality of the original.
Based on the success of these first revivals in the family, in 1991 ITC commissioned the Font Bureau in Boston to create condensed, compressed and extra compressed versions of ITC Franklin Gothic, which increased the flexibility and usefulness of the family. ITC Franklin Gothic is now a family of twenty weights – more than enough for virtually any graphic need.