| Style: | Sans-serif |
| Classifications: | Modulated Grotesque |
| Foundry: | Stephenson Blake |
Britannic is a sans-serif typeface family that was sold in metal type by Stephenson Blake. It is a "modulated" or stressed sans-serif design, in which the vertical lines are clearly thicker than the horizontals.[1] [2] [3] The Klingspor Museum reports that it was originally created by the Wagner & Schmidt foundry of Leipzig, Germany.[4] [5] In design it is intended for headings, advertisements and signs rather than continuous body text. Stephenson Blake advertised it as "just the right note for an advertising or display panel".[6]
Since Stephenson Blake did not continue operations into digital fonts, a variety of digitisations of different weights and widths of Britannic have been released by different companies.[7] [8] [9] Some releases include an all-capitals condensed weight. The bold weight, digitised by URW, is included with some Microsoft software such as Office. A wry commentary on the design, presumably by Microsoft's typography manager Robert Norton, adds: