Impact (typeface)
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| Category | Sans-serif |
|---|---|
| Classification | Realist |
| Designer(s) | Geoffrey Lee |
| Foundry | Stephenson Blake |
| Date created | 1965 |
| Variations | Impact Wide |
Impact is a realist sans-serif typeface designed by Geoffrey Lee in 1965 and released by the Stephenson Blake foundry of Sheffield. It is well known for having been included in the core fonts for the Web package and distributed with Microsoft Windows since Windows 98. More recently, it has been used extensively in image macros or internet memes.
Lee was an advertising design director and designed Impact with posters and publicity material in mind. Its thick strokes, compressed letterspacing, and minimal interior counterform are specifically aimed, as its name suggests, to "impact". Impact has a high x-height, reaching nearly to three-quarters the capital line. Ascenders are short, and descenders even shorter. With narrow apertures and folded-up letterforms, the lower-case can be quite hard to read printed small, especially for people with vision problems. The face is intended for headlines and display use rather than body text. As a display design, it was not released with an italic or bold weight.
Writing in 2004, the year before his death, Lee explained that the design goal was "to get as much ink on paper as possible in a given size with the maximum possible x-height" and to provide a home-grown metal type alternative to European designs in the style, which were complicated for British businesses to license and use. Impact resembles other condensed designs of the period, such as Schmalfette Grotesk (and its successor Haettenschweiler) which is similarly designed, but narrower. Lee wrote that "many of us admired the vitality and colour of what we knew only as Schmalfette, and used it by old-fashioned cut and paste. Use was limited as it was never made in metal as far as I know, and existed then in capitals and numerals only."
It also resembles the Letraset face Compacta and Linotype’s Helvetica Inserat, and is similar to the masthead of Private Eye (which is caps-only but based on a never-released typeface with a lower case), designed by Matthew Carter slightly earlier.
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