Our typefaces demonstrate our brand essence through their complementary differences. Typefaces do more than spell words. Used consistently, they can in themselves become images or symbols for our brand. Our three typefaces are Gotham, Adobe Garamond, and Fette Fraktur.
Gotham is our main display font. Gotham’s forms come from the urban environment. From the lettering that inspired it, Gotham inherited an honest and straightforward tone that is neutral without being clinical and authoritative without being impersonal. The result is a typeface that is friendly without being folksy, confident without being aloof. Gotham Rounded is used for web and screen applications. We also use the following variations: Gotham Light, Gotham Light Italic, Gotham Bold, Gotham Bold Italic.
Adobe Garamond is our signature font. It is the font used for our wordmark. An Adobe Originals design and Adobe’s first historical revival, Adobe Garamond is a digital interpretation of the roman types of Claude Garamond and the italic types of Robert Granjon. Since its release in 1989, Adobe Garamond has become a typographic staple throughout the world of desktop typography and design. Adobe type designer Robert Slimbach has captured the beauty and balance of the original Garamond typefaces while creating a typeface family that offers all the advantages of a contemporary digital type family. We also use the following variation: Adobe Garamond Italic.
Fette Fraktur is our accent font. It should be used sparingly, lowercase only, and only for one to a few words. Fette Fraktur can, when desired, inflect communications with a historical and/or nostalgic link to the University’s Gothic architecture. It's also the the font style in which the University motto is set (as it appears on the open book that is part of the University shield). For hundreds of years, from the Renaissance until World War II, the principal German vernacular type was Fraktur, a style of blackletter. It was originally used for books and newspapers. Fette Fraktur has also experienced a recent resurgence within contemporary popular culture.
Proxima NovaWeb Only
Proxima Nova is a family of web fonts licensed for use on University of Chicago websites. It is intended as a CSS web font replacement for headings set in Gotham, negating the use of sIFR.
These web fonts will display properly in the majority of modern web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, and some others.
