Hamilton Gothic Neue

Typeface

“Gothic Bold” was a set of wood type first featured in J.E. Hamilton’s 1889 “Specimens of Wood Type and Borders” catalog. It was a funky and charming reverse-stress, subtly-serifed typeface consisting of only 26 uppercase characters, a set of numbers, and a handful of special characters. Hamilton Gothic Neue is a revisit and revival of this classic wood type, digitized and updated for the modern age with new lowercase characters, a complete set of ancillary glyphs, and the addition of a “Special Extended” weight to complement the standard condensed letterforms.

The new Special Extended weight, featured in this website’s logo, takes the condensed characters and doubles their width. It’s chunky, funky, and full of sass. Many of the original wood type’s unconventional oddities were included and elaborated on in the lowercase and extended weight, including the sparse serifs, tight counters, thin diagonals, and inconsistent crossbar thickness.

This typeface is available for purchase here.