Typeface · Sans-serif
Trade Gothic
Trade Gothic is a sans-serif typeface designed in 1948 by Jackson Burke (1908–1975), who continued to work on further style-weight combinations, eventually 14 in all, until 1960, while he was director of type development for Linotype in the US. The family includes three weights and three widths.
About Trade Gothic
Trade Gothic is a sans-serif typeface designed in 1948 by Jackson Burke (1908–1975), who continued to work on further style-weight combinations, eventually 14 in all, until 1960, while he was director of type development for Linotype in the US. The family includes three weights and three widths. Like many gothic fonts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Trade Gothic is more irregular than many other sans-serif families that came later, especially later ones like Helvetica and Univers. This variety is often popular with designers who feel that it creates a more characterful effect. Its complex history has left it with several unexpected features; for instance, in some digital releases, the default bold weight is more condensed than the regular weight, the opposite of the norm, with a wider bold offered as an alternative.
From the Wikipedia article “Trade Gothic”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Using Trade Gothic in a book
Sans-serif faces work well for headings, captions, children's books and modern nonfiction. For long-form body text in print, most designers still prefer a serif.
Commercial typefaces require a licence that covers embedding in PDFs and ebooks; check the foundry's licence before you publish.
Free alternatives on Google Fonts
Sources & data
- Structured data from Wikidata Q7831947 (CC0).
- Summary text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).