The Trade Gothic® Next typeface family was designed by Akira Kobayashi in 2008. It is a revised version of the original 1948 Trade Gothic design by Jackson Burke. The Trade Gothic Next family of fonts contains 26 typefaces across several weights, including condensed and italic versions.
The Trade Gothic Next design is a natural evolution of the Gothic typeface designs by Morris Fuller Benton, himself the son of a type founder. Benton’s father, early in the 20th century, invented the matrix cutting machine - a revolution in printing at the time. Morris graduated from school as a mechanical engineer and worked alongside his father at American Type Founders, which had recently established a new design department. Around this same time, the Gothic style of fonts was gaining popularity throughout the typesetting industry.
Gothic is a typographic term for a font shape that is without serifs and is Germanic in origin. The term was applied to Morris Fuller Benton’s famous American Gothic style of sans serif typeface designs such as the News Gothic™ and Franklin Gothic™ type families. Jackson Burke, Director of Typographic Development at Mergenthaler-Linotype, continued the tradition with his classic Trade Gothic design in 1948. Although this typeface has been on the front page and within countless publications, it had some minor faults related to the consistency of form across different weights in this family.
After Burke designed the first twelve weights of the
Trade Gothic design, he spent the next twelve years perfecting and extending this popular font family.
Linotype took up the services of Tom Grace, an American type designer working out of Heidelberg in Germany. Under the leadership of Akira Kobayashi (the Type Director at Linotype since 2001) the Trade Gothic Next design was introduced by Linotype in in 2008 in an attempt to rectify some of the inconsistencies of the original Trade Gothic design, still considered a workhorse font today.
Particular attention was paid to the stroke endings, terminals and changes were also made to the kerning. Stroke widths were altered in the regular and bold versions and an extra weight “heavy” was also introduced in the regular and condensed versions. The rounded letters such as “G” and “O” condensed versions are also more ovoid with the previous versions in the original No. 20 condensed Trade Gothic having parallel sides; this appearance did not match the other condensed sizes. Trade Gothic Next has regularity through the point sizes so they now look more natural alongside each other at varying sizes because they share the same or very similar geometric profiles.
Obvious features from the original Trade Gothic design have remained, the spur in the uppercase G, the simple and very readable finer stroke sans serif with flat terminals and square-dotted lowercase “I” and “j”. Similar to (and often used as a replacement for) the Helvetica® typeface family, the Trade Gothic design has a wide range of applications – most often being used in advertising, newspaper printing and modern multimedia. Over the years just about every font foundry has brought out a version of the Trade Gothic font family. With hundreds of styles, weight and stroke variants, the choices are vast. New Trade Gothic related fonts are still being released regularly.
The newest version of the Trade Gothic Next design was released in OpenType® format so superscript, subscript and proportional lining figures are all available in Adobe CE, ISO-Adobe 2, and Latin Extended character sets; italic is available too in all but the compressed widths.
Trade Gothic Condensed
Trade Gothic in the (RED) LogoThe Trade Gothic Next design has appeared in many newspaper publications. Its narrow but robust appearance makes it ideal for publishers and advertisers requiring easily readable, bold headlines. The fact that the original font was to be used “for the trade” (referring to the typesetters of the day) is not lost in its name.