Barry Deck Template Gothic 1990

  • Not on view

Template Gothic is an important milestone in the history of digital fonts because of its popularity but also because of the designer's unique voice and the vernacular source he used as inspiration—a sign posted in his neighborhood laundromat. Licensed and promoted by Emigre, Inc., Template Gothic was ubiquitous by the end of the 1990s, representing the aesthetic of imperfection beloved by certain designers during the grunge era. Deck, like other typographers of the time, spoke of his desire to abandon the perfection of modernist letterforms: "I was inspired to design a face that looked as if it had suffered the distortive ravages of photomechanical reproduction." His typeface reflects "more truly the imperfect language of an imperfect world, inhabited by imperfect beings."

Gallery label from Standard Deviations, 2011.
Medium
Digital typeface
Dimensions
Variable
Credit
Gift of Emigre, Inc.
Object number
1073.2010
Copyright
© 2023 Emigre, Inc.
Department
Architecture and Design

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