A Font That Celebrates the Street Signs of San Francisco

A Fog City Gothic street sign, made with use of a historic San Francisco neighborhood photo from Western Neighborhoods Project's OpenSFHistory site.

I love a good typeface, and I love San Francisco history, so I was delighted to read about amateur typographer and historian Ben Zotto’s new font, Fog City Gothic. Inspired by San Francisco’s historic street signs, Zotto created Fog City Gothic to harken back to the black-on-white steel signs that graced the streets of the city from 1946 well into the ‘70s. He offers a great deep dive into the history of the city’s street signs, and the Chronicle did a nice feature on him. If you like to dabble in design, get your copies of the font now.