In 2007, on my first trip to New York City, I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love. I admired American Typewriter in all of the I <3 NYC logos, watched Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica fighting over the subway signs, and even caught an occasional appearance of the flawlessly-named Gotham, still a year before it skyrocketed in popularity via Barack Obama’s first campaign.
But there was one font I didn’t even notice, even though it was everywhere around me.
Last year in New York, I walked over 100 miles and took thousands of photos of one and one font only.
The font’s name is Gorton.
It’s hard to believe today that there was a time before I knew of Gorton and all its quirks and mysteries. The first time I realized the font even existed was some time in 2017, when I was researching for my book about the history of typing.
Many keyboards, especially older ones, sported a particular distinctive font on their keycaps. It was unusually square in proportions, and a weird mélange of “mechanical” and “childish.”
The more I looked at it, the more I realized how bizarre and amateurish it was. The G always felt like it was about to roll away on its side. There was a goofy wavy hook sticking out of Q. P and R were often too wide. & and @ symbols would be laughed away in a type crit, and the endings of C felt like grabbing something next to it – a beginning of a ligature that never came.
The strangeness extended to the digits. There was a top-flatted 3 resembling a Cyrillic letter, 7 sloping down in a unique way, a very geometric 4, an unusual – perhaps even naïve – symmetry between 6 and 9, and a conflation of O with 0 that would be a fireable offense elsewhere.
Looking at just a few keyboards, it was also obvious that it wasn’t just one rigid font. There were always variations, sometimes even on one keyboard. 0 came square, dotted, or slashed. The usually very narrow letter I sometimes sported serifs. The R and the 6 moved their middles higher or lower. There also seemed to be a narrower version of the font, deployed when a keycap needed a word and not just a letter. (Lowercase letters existed too, but not very often.)
My first thought was: What a mess. Is this how “grotesque” fonts got their name?
Then, the second thought: I kind of like it.