Morris Fuller Benton
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Morris Fuller Benton (November 30, 1872 –June 30, 1948), prolific and influential American typeface designer who headed the design department of the American Type Founders (ATF).
M.F. Benton was the chief type designer of the American Type Founders from 1900 to 1937, designing more than fifty typefaces, ranging from revivals of historical models like ATF Bodoni, to adding new weights to existing faces such as Goudy Old Style and Cheltenham, and the design of original designs like Hobo, Bank Gothic, and Broadway. Benton's large family of related neogrotesques which he termed "gothics" include Alternate Gothic, Franklin Gothic, and News Gothic all of which were more similar to, and anticipated, contemporary realist sans-serif typefaces like Helvetica than the early grotesque types of his contemporaries.
[edit] Typefaces
Morris Fuller Benton's typeface include:
- Agency Gothic
- Alternate Gothic
- American Text
- Announcement Roman
- Bank Gothic
- ATF Bodoni
- Broadway
- Monotype Bulmer
- Canterbury Old Style
- Century Expanded
- Century Schoolbook
- Cheltenham
- Civilite
- Clearface
- Clearface Gothic
- Cloister Black
- Cloister Open Face
- Commercial Script
- Eagle (Designed for the National Recovery Administration, used on their Blue Eagle posters)
- Empire
- Engravers Old English
- Franklin Gothic
- Garamond No. 3
- Garamont Amsterdam
- Goudy Handtooled
- Hobo
- Lightline Gothic
- News Gothic
- Parisian
- Phenix American
- Piranesi
- Souvenir
- Tower (Constructa is a contemporary revival of Tower)
- Stymie,
- Typo Upright
- Wedding Text
- Wichita
In addition to his strong aesthetic design sense, Morris was a master of the technology of his day. His father, Linn Boyd Benton, invented the pantographic engraving machine, which was capable not only of scaling a single font design pattern to a variety of sizes, but could also condense, extend, and slant the design (mathematically, these are cases of affine transformation, which is the fundamental geometric operation of most systems of digital typography today, including PostScript). Morris worked on many of these machines with his father at ATF, during which these machines were refined to an impressive level of precision. As an advertising device, in 1922 ATF manufactured a piece of type eight points tall containing the entire Lord's Prayer in 13 lines of text, using a cutting tool roughly equivalent to a 2000 dpi printer.
[edit] References
- Baines, Phil, Hastam, Andrew. Type and Typography. Watson-Guptill Publications: 2005. ISBN 0-8230-5528-0.
- Blackwell, Lewis. 20th Century Type. Yale University Press: 2004. ISBN 0-300-10073-6.
- Fiedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History. Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. ISBN 1-57912-023-7.
- Jaspert, W. Pincus, W. Turner Berry and A.F. Johnson. The Encyclopedia of Type Faces. Blandford Press Lts.: 1953, 1983. ISBN 0-7137-1347-X.
- Macmillan, Neil. An A–Z of Type Designers. Yale University Press: 2006. ISBN 0-300-11151-7.
- Meggs, Phillip B. Revival of the Fittest. RC Publications, Inc: 2002. ISBN 1-883915-08-2.
