The original Franklin Gothic™ typeface was the third in a series of sans serif faces designed after American Type Founders was founded. In the early 1900s, ATF’s head of typeface development, Morris Fuller Benton, began to create the type designs that would influence American type design for more than 40 years. The Globe Gothic™ face was his first sans serif design, which was followed shortly thereafter by Alternate Gothic. Around 1902, Franklin Gothic was cut, although it was not released as a font of metal type until 1905.
As he designed Franklin Gothic, Benton was likely influenced by the earlier sans serif designs released in Germany. Berthold had issued the Akzidenz Grotesk® series of typefaces (later known to American printers as “Standard”) in 1898. Akzidenz Grotesk inspired the cutting of Reform Grotesk by the Stempel foundry of Frankfurt in 1903, and the Venus™ series of typefaces by the Bauer foundry, also of Frankfurt, in 1907.
Many years later (in 1980), International Typeface Corporation under license from ATF, commissioned Victor Caruso to create four new weights of Franklin Gothic in roman and italic: book, medium, demi and heavy. This series was followed in 1991 by a suite of 12 condensed and compressed designs drawn by David Berlow.
The capitals are wide (typographers would call them “square”). Lowercase letters share the proportions and letter shapes of serif typefaces, and character stroke weights have a far more obvious thick and thin contrast than most modern sans serif designs. Although somewhat more subtle, weight stress within individual letters also echoes the serif-styled counterparts. For example, the left side of the A is lighter than the right, and the first stroke of the M is lighter than the other three.
