Monotype is proud to offer its renowned Gill Sans family in OpenType Pro format. These new renditions offer the exclusive benefits of the OpenType format including extended character sets and automatic insertion of ligatures and small caps. In addition to English, the new Gill Sans Pro fonts support European and Central European languages such as Baltic, Turkish, Czech, Hungarian and Polish.
Eric Gill was a versatile and brilliant talent. He was active, prolific and successful in many disciplines from wood engraving to sculpture and calligraphy. In the 1920s he turned his creativity to type design and, in 1928, Gill Sans was born. Gill spent much of the 1930s further developing the Gill Sans family and the result is one of his most successful and widely used typeface designs
One of reasons for the enduring success of Gill Sans is that it is based on Roman character shapes and proportions and is unlike virtually any other sans serif typeface. There is a warmth and humanity found in the face that is found in few sans serif designs. Each weight also retains a distinct character of its own. They were not “mechanically” produced from a single design, as is the case with many other sans serif designs. The Light, with its heavily kerned ‘f’ and tall ‘t,’ is open and elegant. The Regular, with its flat-bottomed ‘d,’ flat-topped ‘p’ and ‘q,’ and triangular-topped ‘t,’ has a more compact and muscular appearance. The Bold tends to echo the softer, more open style of the Light, while the Extra Bold and Ultra Bold have their own vivid personalities.
While they have different personalities, all the fonts of the Gill Sans family also work in perfect harmony. Whether on a single page or in long document, Gill Sans quietly unifies any graphic content.
Gill’s approach to type design was uniform, consistent and appropriate. His goals were to create, “Absolutely legible-to-the-last-degree letters, provide beauty of form to all printed communication, and to maintain the dignity of hand drawn letterforms.” Eric Gill’s talent, skill and craftsman ethos are perfectly reflected in the Gill Sans family.
NOTE: Extensive language support and glyph substitution is only available in OpenType savvy applications.