Design Nomenclature / Type

Grotesque

Also called grotesk, gothic

This entry has not been translated yet and is shown in English.

The nineteenth-century sans serifs — Akzidenz-Grotesk, Franklin Gothic, News Gothic. Slight irregularity between letters, a squarish rather than circular bowl, closed apertures, a spurred G, and a lowercase g that is usually single-storey with an open tail. Warmer and less systematic than what followed.

A four-cell grid — grotesque, neo-grotesque, geometric, humanist — each setting capital G and lowercase a and g, with the grotesque cell outlined in accent blue as the class this entry is about. Each cell prints its substitution: Akzidenz-Grotesk, Helvetica, Futura and Frutiger all resolve to Arial, so the four cells are identical. A footnote says cells sharing a face show one design, not the class's. The spurred G and single-storey g the entry describes are named, not drawn.

Not to be confused with

Origin

An insult that stuck. The first sans serifs struck readers as barbarous — grotesque in the sense of the grotto-frescoes, meaning bizarre. American foundries called them Gothic instead, equally inaccurately.

How this term connects

ApertureGeometric sansHumanist sansNeo-grotesqueSlab serifTerminalGrotesque
Related Confused with