The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

> Carve something into plastic, on the other hand, and it can survive decades. Substitute plastic for metal, and you just turned decades into centuries.

"I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted."

I started reading the article with a feeling of "I don't recognize this at all" from the first few images that slowly loaded.

Then we got to the metal plates in elevators and the other uses, and my brain immediately turned around and said "Of course you know this; you've seen this a hundred thousand times.. you absolutely know it even if you don't consciously think about it."

A font forked at least a dozen times over the decades, with forks upon forks upon forks, full of nostalgia for times past.

The site is killing my brave browser. Maybe long thin transoceanic paths, or phase of the moon.

So many partially loaded images.

But definitely worth the wait. A great read. I liked the almost mimetic quality of "which slightly broken font plate is being reused to make the broken "3" I keep seeing" which is a classic detective novel trope, e.g. Lord Peter Whimsey in "strong poison" and a typewriter glitch he recognises.

It's a pretty font and gives that instant retro look on keyboards for example.

I've tried it on the computer with "Gorton Digital" and that's just terrible, I can't recommend it. The spacing/kerning is all wrong.

Hoping someone takes on the project of making a nice digital font, potentially a mono-spaced one too.

Some past comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43053419

Cool to flip through their master copy typeface reference: https://archive.org/details/gorton-master-copy-type-for-all-...

> Of course you will see it, the same way you saw a lot of Arial in the 1990s, or Calibri today.

Well, that didn't last long; Aptos enters the chat.

> There was a goofy wavy hook sticking out of Q. P and R were often too wide. & and @ symbols would be laughed away in a type crit, and the endings of C felt like grabbing something next to it – a beginning of a ligature that never came.

No one gives a shit about this.