Bell Centennial
Bell Centennial
Matthew Carter, 1978
Sans-serif · A phone book. Extreme constraint made visible.
Commissioned by AT&T for phone books, where the constraints were brutal: tiny sizes, terrible ink, absorbent newsprint. Carter cut notches into the letter joints so that when the ink spread it filled them rather than blotting the counters shut — designing not for how the type looks but for how it degrades. It saved AT&T an estimated large fraction of its paper bill by fitting more entries per page.
The facts
- Designed by
- Matthew Carter
- Released
- 1978
- Classification
- Sans-serif
- What it signals now
- A phone book. Extreme constraint made visible.
Where you have seen it
- Every American telephone directory for two decades
Other typefaces from the 1970s
| Typeface | Year | Designer | What it signals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frutiger | 1976 | Adrian Frutiger | Wayfinding. Airports, hospitals, road signs, anything you read while moving. |
This page describes the typeface rather than showing it. Displaying a specimen requires a licensed font file and almost none of these may be redistributed, so the descriptions name the letters to look at instead.
Common questions
- Who designed Bell Centennial?
- Matthew Carter, in 1978.
- What is Bell Centennial used for?
- A phone book. Extreme constraint made visible. You will have seen it on Every American telephone directory for two decades.
Related pages
- Typefaces from the 1970s 2 here
- Akzidenz-Grotesk H. Berthold AG, 1896
- Franklin Gothic Morris Fuller Benton, 1902
- Johnston Edward Johnston, 1916
- Futura Paul Renner, 1927
- Gill Sans Eric Gill, 1928
- Helvetica Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann, 1957
- Univers Adrian Frutiger, 1957
- Optima Hermann Zapf, 1958
Sources
- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)