ITC Goudy Sans Pro
A sans serif typeface designed in the early part of the 20th century was likely to fall into one of two categories: it was either a re-examination of the grotesque typefaces drawn for advertising copy in the late 1800s, or an exercise in modernity that reduced letters to the simplest of geometric shapes. The innovative exception, of course, was the sans serif drawn by Frederic Goudy.
In 1929, the Lanston Monotype Company challenged Goudy to create a sans serif different from the norm. Drawing from Roman lapidary inscriptions, Goudy crafted a type design that was less formal than existing sans serifs, with a cursive italic rather than the more common obliqued roman.
In many ways, Goudy’s sans serif was more modern than the geometric designs of the time. Well-known typographer and typographic historian Robert Bringhurst wrote, “Goudy Sans is the spiritual father of several recent sans serifs, including Erik Spiekermann’s Meta and Officina – and like them, it is not quite as sans as the name suggests.”
The ITC Goudy Sans family has had four distinct “growth spurts” over the years. Goudy originally created the three designs of Heavy, Light, and Light Italic for metal typesetting. Many years later, Compugraphic Corporation (the precursor to Monotype Imaging) revived Goudy’s original work for photocomposition. Several improvements were made to the original design, and three more faces were added to the family. In 1986 ITC re-released the design under a license agreement with Compugraphic, and the family was enlarged again to its present size of four weights and corresponding italics.
Now the ITC Goudy Sans family is available as a suite of OpenType Pro fonts. OpenType’s capabilities include the automatic insertion of old style figures, ligatures and small caps, making this already versatile design a powerful tool for graphic communicators.
Most typefaces have limitations, but few applications are outside the range of ITC Goudy Sans. It can be an excellent communicator in advertising copy, promotional material, catalogs, brochures and even lengthy blocks of text. The new ITC Goudy Sans Pro fonts also offer an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages.