City is a
slab seriftypeface designed by
Georg Trump and released around 1930 by the
Berthold type foundry in Berlin, Germany.[a] Though classified as a slab serif, City displays a strong
modernist influence in its geometric structure of right angles and opposing round corners. The typeface takes inspiration from the machine age, and industry. A consistent application of repeated parts: an outer circle softening interior rectilinear spaces, results in a highly unified and refined typeface.
The lowercase a is composed of a two horizontal rectangles in the interior, the outer skin follows the counter but always contrasting the outer stroke with the organic curves. The face was produced in three weights: light, medium, and bold, each in
roman and
italic. The graphic designer
Jan Tschichold helped to popularize the City typeface by his use of it for his book Typographische Gestaltung published by the Basel publishing house Benno Schwabe & Co.
Commercial uses
IBM Corporation used variations of City for their corporate
logo from 1956 onward[3] and used City Medium on the title pages and covers of their technical manuals for several decades.
Southern Television used City for titling in their news programme Day by Day.
The 1998 anime series Cowboy Bebop used City for its title sequence.
A variant of this typeface was also used for the titles and credits of the
CBS crime drama series, Mannix.
For several years until 2015,
ESPN used City Pro Bold to brand its college
football and
basketball coverage; ESPN has since used it solely for the latter.
Italian Air Force (Aeronautica Militare) used City Bold typeface for their logo.
Australia's
BBL and
WBBL T20 Cricket Tournaments used City for their branding up until 2019. The font is still used in the tournaments' logo.
City Pro
In 2007–09, Berthold released an OpenType Pro version of City called City Pro, which supports Central European, Latin Extended A characters. OpenType features include ordinals, proportional lining figures, subscripts and superscripts, fractions.
Square Slabserif 711
The Square Slabserif 711 font from Bitstream is very similar to City and is available in light, medium, and bold weights. The Square Slabserif 711 also support
Greek and
Cyrillic.[4]
Blackwell, Lewis. 20th Century Type. Yale University Press: 2004.
ISBN0-300-10073-6.
Fiedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History. Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998.
ISBN1-57912-023-7.
Macmillan, Neil. An A–Z of Type Designers. Yale University Press: 2006.
ISBN0-300-11151-7.
Meggs, Philip and Rob Carter. Typographic Specimens: The Great Typefaces. Van Nostrand Reinhold: 1993.
ISBN0-442-00758-2.