Metro is a sans-serif typeface family created by William Addison Dwiggins and released by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company in 1929.
Metro was Dwiggins's first typeface, which he created at the age of 49 after establishing himself as one of the pre-eminent lettering artists and book designers of the early 20th century. In 1928, Dwiggins wrote Layout in Advertising, in which he criticized the lack of "good" sans-serif types available. Harry L. Gage, assistant director of typography at Linotype, reviewed the book, and in 1929 he offered to hire Dwiggins to design the "good" sans-serif he felt was lacking. Dwiggins was brought in as a consultant and quickly established a rapport with Chauncey H. Griffith, the company's head of type design, who would manage the production of all his typefaces for the rest of his career.
Metro was inspired by a wave of new "geometric" sans-serif designs such as Futura, which had attracted attention for their basis on simple geometric shapes like circles and straight lines, rather than on the traditional 'grotesque' style of sans-serifs such as Franklin Gothic. While his opinion of these new designs was less negative, Dwiggins was unsatisfied with the lowercase in existing geometric typefaces and decided to create a font with breaks from pure geometry that could make it more interesting to read. In the midst of the geometric vogue, however, his approach proved less popular than hoped, and the typeface was redesigned several years later to more closely resemble the popular Futura. Several digital revivals in recent years have returned to Dwiggins's original designs or offered them as alternates.
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Background and development
By the time Dwiggins wrote Layout in Advertising, the staff at Mergenthaler were keenly aware of the shortcomings he pointed out. Linotype's system, which cast new type under keyboard control and in solid blocks, was very popular for newspaper use due to its speed advantage over typesetting by hand, but it had been slow to gain acceptance for fine book printing. By the 1920s, the company's leadership had come to feel that the system's chief flaw was a lack of fonts of good design, and they had been working to correct this, having already hired the artistic advisor Edward Everett Bartlett; the British branch had hired the fine printer George W. Jones, and its competitor Monotype Corporation, the commentator on printing Stanley Morison, for similar reasons.
In hiring Dwiggins, it was clear Linotype was after a typeface that could compete with European geometric sans-serifs, which were currently enjoying a vogue. Dwiggins offered that several of these recent releases—namely Kabel, Futura, and Gill Sans—he considered "gothics of good design", but that they were, in his words, "fine in the capitals and bum in the lower-case." He thus endeavored to design a typeface that was less reliant on pure geometry, opting for a two-story a and g, considerable variation in stroke width, and sheared terminals on ascenders and descenders as though drawn with a broadnib pen. These features give his initial design humanist qualities in the vein of Johnston and Gill Sans, but the 1932 redesign largely dispensed with the more overtly humanist elements, and even today it is primarily considered a geometric, like its competitors.
Dwiggins drew only the boldest weight of the family, Metroblack, with three lighter weights extrapolated by the Linotype drawing office based on his design. With a chunky design and wide spacing, Metro was often used in 20th-century American newspapers for section headings (often in competition with other sans-serifs like Futura, Spartan, Tempo and Vogue), and Linotype promoted it as a companion to their 'Legibility Group' of typefaces suitable for printing on poor-quality newsprint paper.
Metal type releases
Metro was released for Linotype hot-metal composition in the following sets:
Metrolite + Metroblack (1929)
Metrothin + Metromedium (1931)
Metrolite No.2 + Metroblack No.2 (1932)
Metrolite No.2 Italic + Lining Metrothin + Lining Metromedium (1935)
Metromedium No.2 Italic + Metroblack No.2 Italic (1937)
Metrolight No.4 Italic + Metrothin No.4 Italic
The initial release comprised the weights Metrolite and Metroblack, the latter being based directly on Dwiggins's original drawings. As a demonstration, an edition of Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska by Rockwell Kent was printed in Metrolite. Two additional weights, Metrothin and Metromedium, followed in 1931.
The Linotype system imposed limitations on character structure, and it was standard to offer two fonts on the same "duplexed" matrix which therefore had to be the same width. Linotype therefore offered Metrolite and Metroblack as a pair, followed by Metrothin and Metromedium; as a result of being forced to share metrics between weights so far removed from each other, glyph shapes go back and forth between wider and more condensed as they step up in weight.
The Metro series was redesigned after entering production, with several characters changed to mimic the then-popular Futura family from the Bauer Type Foundry of Germany. The lowercase a and g were made single-story, the curved e was replaced with a more conventional version with a horizontal bar (originally offered as an alternate), and capital A, M, V, and W gained pointed apexes, among other changes. The new family was named "Metro No. 2" and could be formed by switching in the replacement No. 2 matrices. Linotype also offered a few other alternates, including a four-pointed W and an e with an angled crossbar in the manner of Kabel, and "Unique Capitals" in a decorative, Streamline Moderne style.
Digital revivals and interpretations
Several digitizations have been released by Linotype and its owner and former rival, Monotype:
Metro No. 2, its earliest digital Metro, is based on its use in metal type. It includes three weights: Metrolite, Metromedium, and Metroblack (Metrothin not having made the digital transition), without italics. Two versions of each weight are offered: one with a basic Latin character-set, and one with a more complete collection of accented and special Latin characters.
Metro Office, designed by Akira Kobayashi and released in 2006, offers a modernized design with some use of Dwiggins' original characters (apart from the rounded lowercase e). As its name suggests, it is intended for word-processing applications, with two weights plus obliques. All four styles share metrics, not just with each other, but with all other members of Linotype's "Office" series, allowing seamless changing of fonts and styles without text reflow. However, this also means that many characters have had their shapes altered, giving it a "looser", more conventional aesthetic compared to the original. The italics also include a lowercase f with descender, which was a feature of Metrothin (though none of the other weights) in the metal version.
Metro Nova, designed by Toshi Omagari in 2012 for Linotype: The Film and released commercially in 2013, returns to Dwiggins's original drawings while expanding the character-set with a complete range of accented and alternative glyphs. Characters from Metro No. 2 are offered via OpenType stylistic sets, along with text figures and small caps. The range of weights is expanded to seven, along with six condensed weights, all with obliques. The naming of the weights also does not correspond to the original Metro, with the original four weights roughly equating to Light, Regular, Medium and Black in Metro Nova. In creating the expanded range of options, the design has been regularized compared to the original (whose character widths went back and forth between wider and narrower forms due to the duplexing of weights on the Linotype machine), with a distinct character compared to the version in metal. Nevertheless, it is the most complete version on the market by far, with the closest relationship to Dwiggins's original design.
Besides official Linotype digitizations, many unofficial revivals or designs based on Metro have proliferated: