ADAM COLE

Bell Gothic Bold / Light

The typeface Bell Gothic designed by C. H. Griffith, completed in 1937. The typeface was commissioned based on need, the American telephone company Bell needed a letter form suited to two factors; compressed sentences, and cheap or inferior paper. Bell Gothic font was always intended for use in telephone books.

Griffith had already established the 'Legibility Group' in 1922. Which primarily concerned itself with legible fonts specifically for applications such as newspapers. In this way perfect training for what I consider to be his most successful work Bell Gothic. Consisting of two font weights Bold and Light Griffith identified the primary needs of his clients. Within Bells telephone directories Bold weights were used to list names and numbers. The afore mentioned Light was used for setting addresses.

The design of the font was so well conceived even the print process of the time was factored. Both hot metal and letter press where the printing processes of the day. Griffith was understandably unlikely to able to predict and recognise new printing processes in the design of the typeface.

By 1969 Linotype had introduced the 'Linotron 505', which used photographic developments introducing Cathode Ray Typesetting (CRT). Thereby introducing the world to high-speed offset lithography presses. Fantastic though these process are they had a profound influence on many aspects of design and print, and most notably Bell Gothic.

CRT lead the typeface to fall apart, many of the letterforms (in the 'light' font) broke up. The erosion in the bold weights lead to gaps in intersections of straight and curved strokes. Some printers started to over-ink printing plates whilst this helped the problems of erosion, it caused many characters to run into one another. For example c and l became d, 3 looked like 8, 5 looked like a 6. Imagine the confusion! Not to mention additional cleaning costs incurred by the printers over-inking.

This finally lead to the redesigning of the typeface the mark two version was titled Bell Centennial, designed by Matthew Carter in 1974, and marked 100 years of Bell. Finally I would like to remind the reader that the designer Saul Bass created the iconic bell logotype, and please remember that bell no longer exists and is now AT&T.