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ITC Goudy Sans®

By ITC

ITC Design Staff
Frederic W. Goudy
ITC
Frederic W. Goudy designed three weights of this friendly-looking sans serif font from 1922-1929 for Lanston Monotype in the United States. Goudy was attempting to impart freedom and personality to the sans serif form at a time when geometric sans serifs, such as Futura, were gaining rapid world-wide popularity. To achieve this challenging goal, he looked to lapidary inscriptions and manuscript writing for inspiration. He included elements such as slight swellings of terminal strokes, slab serifs on a few of the caps, alternate uncial forms, and a few swash strokes. The result is uniquely Goudy: charming, instinctive, and just right for adding warmth to magazine or advertising layouts. The design staff at ITC updated and filled out the family for a total of eight styles in ITC Goudy Sans.

The ITC Goudy Sans family developed in three stages. First, Goudy 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. In the process, several improvements were made to the original design, and three more faces were added to the family. Finally, 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.

All typefaces seem to have limitations (especially those with strong personalities), but few applications are outside the range of ITC Goudy Sans. It can be an excellent communicator. Advertising copy, promotional material, catalogs, brochures and even lengthy text copy are ideally suited to ITC Goudy Sans’ capabilities.

Humanistic Sans
Sans Serif