City (typeface)


City is a slab serif typeface designed by Georg Trump and released around 1930 by the Berthold type foundry in Berlin, Germany. Though classified as a slab serif, City displays a strong modernist influence in its geometric structure of right angles and opposing round corners. The typeface takes inspiration from the machine age, and industry. A consistent application of repeated parts: an outer circle softening interior rectilinear spaces, results in a highly unified and refined typeface.
The lowercase a is composed of a two horizontal rectangles in the interior, the outer skin follows the counter but always contrasting the outer stroke with the organic curves. The face was produced in three weights: light, medium, and bold, each in roman and italic. The graphic designer Jan Tschichold helped to popularize the City typeface by his use of it for his book Typographische Gestaltung published by the Basel publishing house Benno Schwabe & Co.

Commercial uses

In 2007–09, Berthold released OpenType Pro version of City called City Pro, which supports Central European, Latin Extended A characters. OpenType features include ordinals, proportional lining figures, subscripts and superscripts, fractions.

Square Slabserif 711

The Square Slabserif 711 font from Bitstream is very similar to City and is available in light, medium, and bold weights. The Square Slabserif 711 also support Greek and Cyrillic.