League Gothic is a sans-serif Gothic typeface, originally designed by American typeface designer Morris Fuller Benton in 1903. The League of Moveable Type has made this typeface available as a font under the the Open Font License as it was designed pre-Steamboat Willie and is under the public domain. Morris Fuller Benton designed over fifty typefaces, including well-known (to designers at least) ones such as Franklin Gothic, ATF Bodoni, Century Schoolbook, News Gothic, and Parisian.
How can you use League Gothic? It’s a very bold and strong font, easily readable from far away. Actually, it reminds me a lot of the Marvel Comics logo, so naturally I used it to create a tightly-spaced Batman (DC Comics) related type specimen. In all caps, the font has a very tall feeling because the legs of the letters are very tall – the x-height seems to be much taller in proportion to the full letter height than in other typefaces. The League of Moveable Type page for League Gothic has a nice type specimen for the font – it’s a clear and readable typeface for info graphics, but also could make for a nice, epic-feeling logo.
League Gothic has coverage of some accented characters in Latin Supplemental, but Latin Extended A and B are not covered:
League Gothic is licensed under the Open Font License.
- Fedora Font Wishlist Entry:http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/TLOMT_League_Gothic_fonts
- Upstream Homepage: http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/fonts/7-league-gothic
So, you want to package League Gothic?
Way to go – you’re rad! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:
Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:
And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:
Last Week’s Font
Last week’s font was Tuffy Infants 2 by Thatcher Ulrich. Nobody has picked up the font package request yet! Would you like to?
Just to let you know that I finished packaging font-manager (http://code.google.com/p/font-manager/) and that it will be in Fedora later this week, I just need to import it (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=551878).
It's really a good app to manage your fonts!
Hey I haven't seen that app before – it looks good! Thank you so much for packaging it!
@Batman was here:
he was? Oo did you get a picture?
I tried to, but unfortunately Superman got in the way and blocked my view.
I though one can't copyright a font face, only the implementation and I am pretty sure the .ttf for League Gothic was not created in 1903.
I can see myself using this font for posters.
Hi Nicu,
I didn't say the font was created in 1903. I said the *type face* was created in 1903, which is entirely possible!
I think TLOMT's public domain statement is a little off too….
I downloaded and had a look at the font.
The .otf file shows as an ODF template on my machine , not sure why that is. Opening it shows "Generated in 2009 by FontLab Studio. Copyright info pending."
There is no license doc.
Question: Why does it need an "Open Font License", or, for that matter, any license at all, if it is in the public domain? If it is in the public domain, copyright has expired. There is no longer a "Rights" holder to license it. It belongs to the public.
The typeface is in the public domain. The font is Open Font License. A font is not the typeface, but the actual computer program that allows you to use the typeface. There's a difference between typeface and font – the two terms are not synonymous.
Thanks for the clarification. That makes sense.
Sure, although there still is some confusion for me as well – that The League of Moveable Type is claiming the typeface of League Gothic to be public domain since it was created pre-Steamboat Willie is confusing for me, because as I understand it there is no copyright on typefaces, created then or now – you cannot copyright the letterforms of the English (or any other) language. So I'm not quite sure what they were getting at with their public domain claim, but I figured they knew what they were talking about (which can be a very bad assumption on the internet especially regarding legal matters!) If I have the time I will try to figure out what the real scoop on this is.
It may be that typefaces are not copyrightable in the USA, but for the rest of the world the situation is not that clear.
[…] week’s font was League Gothic by The League of Moveable Type. Nobody has picked up the font package request yet! Would you like […]