Like many geometric sans-serifs, Century Gothic's design has a single-story "a" and "g", and an "M" with slanting sides resembling an upturned "W". Century Gothic has a high x-height. Its origins come from a design intended for large-print uses such as headings and signs, and so it has a reasonably purely geometric design closely based on the circle and square, with less variation in stroke width than fonts designed for small sizes tend to show, and a relatively slender design in its default weight.
Design characteristics
ITC Avant Garde was intended as a display design for large headings and advertisements and as a result Century Gothic is quite a light typeface, especially in default weight, with the classic display typeface feature of tight spacing and quite wide characters, in contrast to Twentieth Century which was intended more for small-size applications with a more solid stroke weight and open spacing. While its structure is similar to Futura, its regular style is between Futura and Twentieth Century's regular and light weights. Century Gothic was one of several clones of PostScript standard fonts created by Monotype in collaboration with or sold to Microsoft around this time, including Arial, Book Antiqua and Bookman Old Style. It was bundled with Microsoft Office 4.3 in 1994 and subsequently provided with Plus! 95, Windows 98, Microsoft Works, and various versions of Microsoft Office up to 2010. A version of Century Gothic, Levenim, that includes Hebrew alphabet characters has been included in later versions of Windows.
According to the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Century Gothic uses much less ink than other, similar sans-serif typefaces. It was found that Century Gothic uses about 30% less ink than Arial. In order to save money that would be spent on printer ink for other typefaces, the university reportedly switched their default e-mail and printing typeface from Arial to Century Gothic. However, the typeface has also been found to use more paper—due to its wider letters—meaning that the savings on ink are offset by an increase in paper costs. Along with the serif typefaceGaramond, Century Gothic is one of the two typefaces that PrintWise, an initiative of the U.S. government's General Services Administration, recommends U.S. government workers use for printed documents.
Related fonts
Apart from Avant Garde and Futura, a number of other fonts based on Avant Garde have been created to substitute for it in PostScript implementations. A particular case of this is an open-sourced set of fonts developed by URW and donated to the Ghostscript project to create a free PostScript alternative. This includes an AvantGarde clone known as "Gothic L". It is used by much open-source software such as R as a system font. A derivative of this family known as "TeX Gyre Adventor" has been prepared for use in the TeX scientific document preparation software.
