You’re correct that internet searches will bring up sites that offer free downloads of Gotham. There are also sites that claim that Gotham is free for personal use.
But Hoefler & Company (H&Cº) will beg to disagree, just like Adobe would do so about freely-available copies of software like Photoshop being available online for download.
H&Cº have a long history of being especially proprietorial about their font licensing. Their licences have been much more specific than other typefoundries: even spelling out in the past precisely how tall characters could be if they were used to produce bitmap graphics (≤ 500 pixels). I’d have to refer back to my original Hoefler Type Foundry catalogues and specimens for precise details.
Unless new H&Cº owner Monotype have dramatically changed the licensing terms on H&Cº fonts, it’s reasonable to assume that the versions of Gotham freely available online are not there out of H&Cº’s own choice. If you’re a professional who intends to produce designs that use Gotham to make money, then it’ll be your responsibility to see that you have purchased the appropriate font licences from H&Cº.
The irony is that the letterforms that you find in Gotham are not especially original. If you look closely at American buildings dating back to the mid-20th century, you’ll notice similar letterforms being used. These letterforms were very popular in the architectural trade, because they were easy for architects and engineers to draw.
The reason why modern designers are required to license Gotham’s interpretation of these letterforms is because Tobias Frere-Jones decided to spend the time translating them into digital format. Gotham is the software product, and Monotype and H&Cº are the current licence owners.
One interesting side-effect: during the 2000s, Gotham became a very popular typeface along with mid-century geometric slab-serifs like Monotype’s Rockwell. Periodicals in New York – H&Cº’s home town – were the first mass-users, followed later by politicians. Nowadays, Gotham appears to be the default typeface used by American politicians for campaigning.
But not everyone could afford to license Gotham. Some designers noticed a remarkable similarity between Gotham’s geometric letterforms and those of the late Adrian Frutiger’s Avenir typeface, which was quietly released in 1988. Avenir was much more affordable – and its licensing terms far more relaxed – so it became increasingly popular as the ‘poor designer’s Gotham’.
Avenir is an excellent design in itself: it’s easy to think of Gotham as a version of Avenir with a larger overall x-height. What also helped is that Apple included Avenir as a standard system font for Mac OS X starting in the 2000s. And since many designers use Macintoshes, Avenir became a default choice over Gotham by the virtue of being preinstalled on all new Apple computers.
Best regards
Andrew
–30–
ANDREW KEITH STRAUSS / ACTP / CTT+ / ACI / ACE / ACP
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