Champion Gothic Font

Champion Gothic font is a sans serif font family designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 1991. Inspired by the sundry American wood types that were once used indiscriminately by nineteenth century poster printers creating the riotous aesthetic we in America identify as Americana, Champion is a collection of six sans serifs related not by weight, but by width. Champion Gothic was created to be used in Sports Illustrated, where the type appeared in 1991.

Champion Gothic was inspired, in form and philosophy, by American woodtypes of the late nineteenth century. Woodtype makers didn’t make typefaces ‘in series’ (as more recently this term has been defined, meaning the same design being reshaped to make different weights and widths) before the modern idea of the rational type family, but they did produce typefaces ‘in series’ in that they grouped visually related designs together under the same name. While fonts produced in series didn’t usually have a central design to be followed, Champion does the same. Therefore, one of Champion’s six styles feels em and another with wider margins, and so on.