I think every designer should write a love letter to a font at least once in their lifetime.
This is mine: A 150-year-old font you have likely never heard of, and one you probably saw earlier today.
@mwichary I enjoyed this a great deal and now I, too am gortonpilled.
@jessamyn Thank you!
@mwichary it has a name! I have loved these engraved signs for decades and it never occurred to me to even describe it as a font.
@skorgu Does it, though? 
@mwichary it does now. I decree it.
@mwichary What a fantastic article!
@mwichary This was an excellent read, thank you.
@mwichary This was great! Now I'm curious about the routing font they use in National Parks, and which a few people put together from tracing it out:
https://nationalparktypeface.com
Seems like Gorton?!
@nazhamid Yes! Listed on the subpage here: https://aresluna.org/the-hardest-working-font-in-manhattan/recreations
@mwichary Whoops, missed that! Cool to see all of these.
@nazhamid This was originally in the main article, but I cut it for flow.
@mwichary I learnt a lot in this, so thanks for writing it.
@mwichary you might like to add Quarkwell https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/thetypeworks-com/quarkwell/ another modern version of a pantograph router font tho its letter shapes are slightly different to Gorton
@fanf Oh, great find! A Gorton/Modified combo. Just added + credited you in the footer! https://aresluna.org/the-hardest-working-font-in-manhattan/recreations/
@mwichary Thanks for this delightful retrospective. In an earlier life I built control panels, and used several versions of engraved letters, Letraset, and eventually silk screening, so many of the things you touch on were familiar, and not a little nostalgic. (I even tried hand lettering some conference nameplates once, with mixed results at best; my intentions were good.) A well-written, and enjoyable post.
@mwichary I know it's got to be Gorton and I want to read it but nothing is loading. 
@samueljohnson Yeah, I see that too.
@samueljohnson @mwichary oh good. It isn't just me.
@LexGear @samueljohnson Works for me now!
@mwichary think we might have knocked out your site!
@mwichary Oh no, you've been Slashdotted
@mwichary in this case it's the Verge: https://www.theverge.com/typography/613618/go-read-marcin-wichary-gorton
(Vergedotted? Decoded? Dieter Bohned?)
@dsandler Yeah, very annoyed by this. Didn’t know this was still even a thing. Not much I can do about it, except find a better host that DreamHost later this month!
@mwichary I think your webserver is working very hard too
@mwichary this page won't load for me. 
@mwichary Oh wow, this was a fascinating read! I acquired a Leroy lettering set from my neighbour last year and while I'm not sure what condition it's in or what I'm going to do with it if it's usable, I recognized some of those letter shapes *instantly*. How cool!
@mwichary I guess this is getting a lot of attention because the page isn't loading for me either.
@bgoewert Yeah, it went to Hacker News and The Verge. Please keep trying!
@mwichary Absolutely fantastic. 
@mwichary @deviantollam Dev, I think you will like this article. It's about the engraved fonts you see in elevators and access control panels.
@overeducatedredneck @mwichary I adore this!
And, in fact, in our elevator talks Howard Payne and I specifically mentioned Gorton font! How cool!
@mwichary
That is an absolutely cracking article! Fascinating!
@mwichary recognised Gorton just from the thumbnail! i know it bc it was used pretty much exclusively for hardware in the Apollo (&earlier I think?) program, like the AGC & DSKY :)
When did routing into plaques become common?
Gravestones were absolutely ruined when DTP came along, and they gave up pantographs and templates.
@mwichary @kayserifserif this article fills a gap in typographic education (mine at least).
We learnt a lot about the history and evolution of serifs, and not nearly enough about the practicality of their absence.
@mwichary This is so lovely, thank you for sharing it.
@mwichary just finished the essay. oh my god it was brilliant - the photos are amazing and I can feel the care put into this. can't wait to see what's next :)
@mwichary This is such a great dense design dive, I love it! The numbers have so much wonky personality. Thanks for putting this together!
(Also, please publish an RSS feed 
)
@mwichary
"Gorton was older than Gill Sans, Futura, or Johnston’s London Underground font." Respect!
I should sit down and compose a love letter to Bembo
@tuban_muzuru @mwichary yes. Yes you should.
@mwichary What a fantastic post. Learned so much about a typeface that even as I designer I never really thought about. Bravo.
@mwichary This is lovely and also gave me a long-forgotten muscle memory because my parents ran a sports trophy business in the 80s, and I got pretty good at engraving people's and pets' names on trophies with a hand pantograph which used a Gorton-family typeface
@fsvo That’s cool! I have never actually gotten to use a pantograph and now I really want to.
@mwichary I would never have expected to be so enthralled by an article about a font.
@mwichary I have a mysterious font a bit like this that's seen everywhere but barely documented
The place i first took notice of it was on credit cards, notabily the embossed expiry date and cardholder name
It's standardized for credit cards to use Farrington 7b, OCR-A and OCR-B, but there's a fourth font that I haven't been able to identify that I've seen referred to as "Standard Gothic"
I've attached some examples from credit cards. I'd love to track it down
@adryd Would be great to investigate!
@mwichary *wow*. awesome article and beautiful photos that make me reconsider which objects i see in a city.
@mwichary That's how you tell a story.
@mwichary I don't have time to read this whole blog entry tonight, but I am ENRAPTURED by the bit I've read so far. 
I'll need to finish reading this if my ADHD doesn't make me forget by the time I get home from work tomorrow.
@mwichary Thrills! Chills! Twists! Turns! (Well done, I was riveted the whole way through)
Elephant a "font" is a specific size, style, and weight of a "typeface", but that distinction is lost on younger folks who grew up with adobe's and microsoft's mis-labeling "typeface" as "font".
my favourite typeface is brighton. not quite serif, not quite sans, and the lower-case g is exceptional! 
@HybridElephant @mwichary I don't disagree, but... The menu item is called Font
i know that's what the menu item is, but the menu item was mislabled by aldus, which then became adobe. it stuck, because there weren't enough people who knew the difference complaining about it.
i was a linotype operator in the mid-'70s, and i can assure you that the correct terminology is "typeface".
@HybridElephant @drj This is mentioned and explained in the essay.
This is wonderful and useful. As a native New Yorker with an casual/intermittent interest in typography, I always thought it was weird that I know what typefaces are on the London Underground or German highways but not the one I see every single day of my life. Now I know both what it is and why the answer wasn't a simple search engine query away.