Garage Gothic

Garage Gothic explores the coarse, unvarnished shapes of ephemeral printing. In the 1980s, Tobias Frere-Jones collected discarded tickets from parking garages in Brooklyn, intending to use them in collages. The numbers on the tickets had a simple matter-of-fact geometry, which contrasted with the smearing and blurring of rapid printing. He was taken with this uneasy combination of voices, and would later use them as a basis for Garage Gothic, adding two extra weights and hundreds of new characters. “I wanted to make this crude vernacular as valid and useful as classic types of past centuries, and also record a genre that is routinely omitted from type history, despite its being part of our landscape for decades.” The truncated centers of M and W recall the monospaced forms often found in mechanical printing, while the rounded corners and joins make blurriness into a central theme. [frerejones.com]

Originally released by Font Bureau in 1992 and moved to Frere–Jones Type in 2020 [fontsinuse.com], available through Type Network. An updated version was published on the foundry’s website in December 2024.