Gorton recreations

When I started looking into Gorton, I couldn’t find any reasonable modern recreation that could be installed on my computer.

What I understand now is that there were recreations – and even more were made in recent years – but if the font itself barely had a name, it won’t be a surprise that most of the revivals didn’t realize that name existed, either.

Instead, there have been three recreations named after park and maritime plaques carved with Gorton, and another called DSKY after the computer that flew to the Moon with keycaps sporting Gorton. There are recreations called Leroy, AV Hershey, and MIL-33558 – and generic Router and Daily Special (another perfect name, for those felt board menus).

There was one recreation named plainly Gorton, but it seems lost to time. URW Gordon comes from 1995, when George Gorton the company still existed as an independent entity, so it was probably safer to misspell the trademarked company name. Somewhat appropriately, for a while, the only recreation named Gorton is Gorton Digital, itself requiring a convoluted set of instructions to create.

Many recreations are bad even by the standards of engraving fonts. Some are created by amateurs (but so was, perhaps, Gorton?), others by talented type makers. Just like Modified did, a few fix Gorton’s mistakes in order to make the result more usable, which provokes a question: how many fixes can be made before the new font becomes something else altogether? (I commissioned Inga Plönnings to create Gorton Perfected, which is a variable font with bells and whistles and many new characters, but also isn’t truly monoline, so some of its original soul is gone.)

I collected twenty-two recreations I know of in the table above. Its messiness is a microcosm of Gorton’s tricky history. The most well-known application for any of the above – outside of keyboard nerds and people recreating labels for old equipment – must be Bryant, used for the opening titles of Last Week Tonight.