I'm increasingly surprised by what this little series reveals: if you'd asked me six months ago to name the greatest designers' type designer, without hesitation I'd have replied 'Adrian Frutiger'. And I suspect that many of my fellow designers would have said the same (but, you know, they're more than likely to leave a comment over there on the right to contradict me). But there's a name that wouldn't have been on my list at all: Morris Fuller Benton. That may, of course, simply be because I didn't receive my design education in America. So apologies, my American friends, if I do you a disservice.



So here's good old Morris mentioned for the third time in the series (previously here and here). The lighter weights of News Gothic were designed by Benton in 1908 for American Typefounders. This typeface is quite similar to his other sans serifs from the early twentieth century, Franklin Gothic and Alternate Gothic. The bold weights were added in 1958. The caps in News Gothic have a similar visual width to each other, and the lowercase is compact and powerful. These design attributes contributed to Benton's strong handle on the sans serif genre, and for years his types have been popular for newspaper headlines and many other uses.