Hoefler and Frere-Jones on Gotham, Obama’s Font of Choice

Because this writer can’t get enough Obama and will shamelessly use this blog to shameless share his politics, we turn to Mr. “I Made Typography Cool Again” Gary Hustwit and his most recent post, “A Font We Can Believe In.” In it, he shares a bit about Obama using Gotham as his default “change” font and then goes on to share a bonus clip from his film Helvetica, left out of the original but available on the new DVD, talking to Hoefler and Frere-Jones about how they created Gotham, originally for GQ magazine. Here’s a bit:

Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones spoke about the creation of Gotham during our interview for Helvetica, and looking back at their description of what GQ wanted from the font, it sounds surprisingly Obama-esque. “GQ had a dual agenda of wanting something that would look very fresh, yet very established, to have a credible voice to it,” says Hoefler. It also needed to look very masculine and “of-the-moment.” Mission accomplished.

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