DesignJourney: CDinD: Century Gothic

A spacious, modern version of a classic mid-century font, the Century Gothic® design embodies the digital age with its sleek sans serif style, but still retains the graceful geometric look common to early 20th-century typefaces. It is supported by all major browsers on the web and is therefore considered a “safe” font to use for web design as it will translate well across multiple platforms.

Century Gothic is a design based on 20th Century, which was drawn by Sol Hess between 1936 and 1947. Century Gothic sustains the basic design of 20th Century, but has an enlarged ‘x’ height and has been modified to ensure suitable output from modern digital systems. Its design is influenced by the geometric style sans serif faces which were popular during the 1920s and 30s, and by the desire to give it widths compatible with ITC Avant Garde Gothic. Century Gothic has many notable features. One significant characteristic it holds, is its single story lowercase “a” and “g”. The overall character of the typeface is very geometric and generalized. It does not contain many true variations in its weight. Its x-height is quite large, with ascenders that are very subtle and minute. The lowercase “i” and “j” have thick and rounded dots or tittles.

Century Gothic is found frequently in movie posters. It is also the main typeface for a few television stations, like The Ellen Degeneres Show and House. Because of its clear clean design, the Century Gothic design can often be found in at use in schools and when teaching languages. Because this is a font that is often a part of the standard Microsoft font packages, it is often used as a substitute for the similar Futura typeface.

According to the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Century Gothic uses much less ink, saving money on printer ink. They reportedly switched their default e-mail and printing font from Arial to Century Gothic because it uses about 30% less ink.However, the font is also reported to use more paper (since its letters are wider), meaning that the savings on ink are offset by an increase in paper costs.

Famous examples use of font:

Heavily used in the standing sets of Star Trek: Enterprise as part of the Starfleet standards for that television series' stated time period of the 2150s.
The logo of the Canadian music duo Crystal Castles.
The main font of The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
The main font of EA's third-person shooter, Battlefield Heroes.
The logo of GMA Network.
Weezer's "weezer" logo.
The main font for the video game Bioshock.
Used briefly throughout the Jak and Daxter video game series.
The beginning and end credits in the US television series House.
Century Gothic with all caps is the font used in the logo of the Australian Association Football club Western Sydney Wanderers FC.
The opening titles and the credits of The Hunger Games.
The default font on the 2012 Summer Olympic Games medallions.
The band Franz Ferdinand's logo.
One of the lower thirds graphics for Fox News Channel.
The main font of the video game Civilization V.
The interface font of the computer game SimCity 5.