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City of Westminster

Contributed by Fonts In Use Staff on Feb 12th, 2016. Artwork published in .
City of Westminster
Source: transact.westminster.gov.uk City of Westminster. License: All Rights Reserved.

This post was contributed by Antje, who writes:

The City of Westminster is a local authority in London, and the seat of the British government (hence the use of “Westminster” as common metaphor). The current City of Westminster logo came into use around 2001.

While doing a dissertation into the history of London Borough logos and symbols, I initially discovered that the wordmark used ITC Garamond: however, further research discovered that this logo looked as if it used Apple Garamond for the wordmark, because the eye of the lower-case ‘e’ is smaller than other versions of Garamond that you can buy today (including ITC Garamond Narrow).

However, Florian Hardwig, has confirmed to me after time of press that the typeface is indeed ITC Garamond, only 78% narrower so that it appears like Apple Garamond, which can be confusing for the untrained eye. See comment below.

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1 Comment on “City of Westminster”

  1. I’m afraid the story here is more banal: This seems to be simply ITC Garamond (Regular), electronically condensed by 78%. No Apple IP was harmed, only good typographic taste.

    See this post for some background about Apple Garamond. David Lemon of Adobe Type commented:

    The first “Apple Garamond” was indeed an algorithmically-condensed version of ITC Garamond. It was done by Adobe, had only one weight, and was named ITC Garamond Narrow. Apple later worked with Bitstream to get the Apple Garamond family drawn (resulting in better weighting & contrast than the algorithmic version).

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