Gotham

Drawn from lettering Frere-Jones photographed on New York buildings — signs painted by sign painters rather than designed by typographers, which is where its particular plainness comes from. The Obama campaign's use of it in 2008 was so effective that it triggered roughly a decade of American brands adopting geometric sans-serifs, and it is now hard to see it without seeing that campaign.

The facts

Designed by

Tobias Frere-Jones

Released

2000

Classification

Sans-serif

What it signals now

American, optimistic, competent. The 2008 Obama campaign and everything that copied it.

Where you have seen it

• Obama 2008
• The cornerstone of One World Trade Center
• Netflix's earlier identity
• Spotify's earlier identity

Other typefaces from the 2000s

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.