Champion Gothic
— Designed by Jonathan Hoefler

Champion Gothic is a love letter to wood type, and the early attempts type cutters made at interpolating a single style into a variety of widths. Wood type in the US was pioneered by mad scientists who strained good taste and legibility in an attempt to cover the broadest range of ornament, width and weight, and Champion carries that heart and passion through in its design.

There are a lot of digital revivals of wood typefaces available, but I don’t think any of them combine the warmth of the original designs with the craft Hoefler brings to Champion. Many of Champion’s weights are close translations of classic wood typefaces, lending the family a slightly mismatched, eclectic quality. There are several details that carry through regardless of the weight: the incised spur on the “G”, the curved leg on the “R” and the luxurious curve on the flag of the “5.” These shared details lend the family just enough consistency while letting each weight stand confidently as its own design.

While the more interpolation-heavy design of its successor, Knockout, begets more weights, widths and overall consistency, each weight of Champion feels like its own person, optimized only for itself and no one else. There are no “forced” or awkward weights in Champion because none of them are particularly obliged to obey the rules set by each other. It’s just a bit awkward and mismatched in a way that suits the fast-paced, slap-dash nature of the job printing typefaces it emulates.

Finally, the weight that has the clearest ties to a historic wood type specimen is Heavyweight. Though it’s the widest weight, it’s not an extended version of any of the other weights in the way a design like Knockout would be crafted. Instead, it’s based on the generically named Gothic^[10], a thick, blocky design that many type manufacturers in the US sold in the 19th century. It’s one of my favorite wood typefaces—a delightful and charmingly unrefined mess of a design.

I can’t look at Gothic and not smile, and Champion carries over most of the best aspects of it and smooths over a few of the quirks. Champion Gothic gives characters like the “W” and “Y” deeper incisions so they have more negative space and don’t “fill in” so much, helping them feel less bulky and stay legible at smaller sizes. The counters stay comically small for the most part, though the “A”, “P” and Q” have slightly taller counters in their bowls to prevent them from feeling swallowed up. The “S” is slightly less of an inconsistent slither than the original (I have to think the original typecutter got to designing the “S” and just gave up).

The biggest change is the tail of the “Q”, which juts to the side in Gothic and hangs below on Champion. This type of descender was avoided in wood type designs because it required the block to be taller than the other letters without a descender (you can see the problematic overlap in the example above), and made locking the type up significantly more difficult^[11] . Another drawback was that it prevented “set solid” line-to-line lockups, which cram as much type as possible inside of the composition. Champion’s “Q” feels distinctively more serpentine and floral than the rest of the typeface, and I’ll have more thoughts on this detail throughout the review.

Another unique character is the “Q,” which in the narrower weights dips straight down off the bowl before curling up on itself^[15]. This type of outrageous descender wasn’t very common in wood type but it lends Champion a unique flair that sets it apart from more literal wood type revivals. It gives an organic flair to a design that breaks free of the family’s rudimentary movable-type roots.

Champion has some of the qualities of a flat-side sans like Druk^[17], but there’s more air in the counters and more curves in details like the tail on the “Q” and the leg of the “R.” It does well when set nice and tight and walks the fine line between creating a “full” line of text without wasted negative space and still having some unique character in the letterforms. It’s hard for condensed sans to balance flat sides while still sneaking curves in, and Champion does it really well.

The most obvious use for Champion Gothic is in designs that are purposefully referencing wood type broadsides^[21], but the clean monumental nature of the letterforms make it well-suited for simpler presentations as well. On the eclectic side of the spectrum, Lamm & Kirch designed this really rad flyer for Jugendclub No Name in Großpösna, Germany^[18]. The mix of simple illustrations, borders and the mix of typefaces pays homage to classic broadsides. I love when these types of posters use varying heights of typefaces to create form and space inside of the composition without having to resort to graphic elements.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Champion is used in the sparse aesthetic of YUCA magazine^[20]. The font’s wood type origins have the secondary effect of making each letterform feel self-fulfilled and confident—some typefaces are explicitly designed to be most effective when used in strings of words, and some are designed with characters that stand on their own. The flat edges make them feel more rectangular and “complete.” Each glyph is simple and earthy without straying into feeling “grimy” or sloppy. Many condensed faces would feel too sterile to work alongside the naturalistic imagery in this design, but the balance between heritage, human craft and conciseness is where Champion excels.

Champion was originally designed for Sports Illustrated, and it has seen a long life in editorial design since then. Champion really plays well with softer serifs that share its hand-touched, warm voice. Going back to YUCA magazine, you’ll find many weights of Champion used alongside Century Oldstyle^[24]. Despite the disparity in weight between Champion’s Heavyweight and the slender Century Oldstyle, the two typefaces feel harmonious because of their shared movable type backgrounds. Even reversed out, they feel like they have been pressed into the page. The physicality of Champion’s letterforms plays so well against the softness of Century Oldstyle and the real-world spaces showcased in the magazine’s photography.

Quirks and eccentricities

Champion has very tight counters, so it’s best saved for the headline use cases it was designed for. Another limitation of Champion when compared to Knockout is that all of the weights are fairly heavy, even in the thinnest weights. This limits the tones of voice Champion can take on, despite it’s range of widths. It’s always going to feel very “full” and thick on the page.

Champion really looks great set in all-caps with tight leading^[23], but it’s those use cases where the plunging tail on the “Q” causes problems. Because it descends so far from the baseline it can force you to add leading, which creates a “striping” effect that isn’t optimal considering how dense each line of Champion feels. Knockout moved to a tail design that stayed along the baseline to avoid this issue, and it’s a shame it’s not present as an alternative here, because as you can see in the classic Gothic specimen earlier in the review^[10], the simpler tail feels more familial with the rest of the design.

Champion is not a typeface you should use if you want something to feel slick or buttoned-up. True to its wood type origins, it feels naturalistic, has a physical presence and conveys brutish utilitarianism. Use it if you want your design to feel like it was crafted by hand, with all the little imperfections that come with it. Condensed faces so often feel cold and impersonal to me, but Champion is one of the first typefaces I come to when I absolutely need to use one due to its warmth and familiarity.