Century Gothic

Century Gothic is a geometric sans-serif typeface released by Monotype Imaging in 1991. It is strongly influenced by the font Futura, though with a higher x-height, and its design history also derives from two separate typefaces intended as Futura competitors. It is a digital typeface that has never been made into actual foundry type.

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While many geometric sans-serif typefaces have been released to compete with the popular typeface Futura, Century Gothic is perhaps unique in its origin: it redraws one to match the design proportions of a second. Distinctive, Futura-derived features of Century Gothic are its single-storey lowercase a and g. However, it has a much higher x-height (height of lowercase letters), an effect which promotes readability especially at small print sizes, and which was particularly popular in the 1970s for general-purpose typefaces, making it less similar to Futura than many other knockoff typefaces of the period.

Its design starts from Sol Hess's Twentieth Century, which was drawn between 1937 and 1947 for the Lanston Monotype Company. Century Gothic was then redrawn to be metrically identical to the popular Avant Garde Gothic, designed by Herb Lubalin, and released by the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) in 1970.