VTC Martin Display
Vocal Type · 2016
A wood type grotesque revival drawn directly from the letterpress 'I AM A MAN' placards carried during the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike, digitised as a variable font with italics.
About
The letterforms originate from Hamilton Gothic No. 6243, a typeface from Hamilton's 1906 wood type catalogue, identified through a chance discovery of a 1960 Hamilton Wood Type specimen. Additional weights were drawn from related Hamilton Gothic faces, with punctuation sourced from early 1960s headlines of The Baltimore Afro-American Newspaper. VTC Martin Display stays closest to the original placard forms, bold in its uppercase and lighter in its lowercase, and now includes variable italics.
Classification
Derived directly from Hamilton Gothic No. 6243, a wood type grotesque from Hamilton's 1906 catalogue, with additional weights drawn from related Hamilton Gothic typefaces; the letterpress origin and protest placard source material place it firmly in the display category.