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Gordon may be described as a slab-serif. Indeed, very early prints, which were printed on slightly moist hand-made paper, have similarly low stroke contrasts and rounded corners, inside and outside, also on the serifs. That’s what makes this typeface so communicative and mannerly. Gordon’s aesthetic appeal arises from the lively movement of the letter’s lines. This is never arbitrary. It either supports the harmonious letter spacing or the open images of the individual figures. The accompanying italics are highly idiosyncratic original creations, almost with a handwriting style. Gordon also forms nice compact lines with the somewhat broader small capitals. It seems that users need a feeling for the typeface to really appreciate its qualities.

Georg Salden describes Gordon as a “rounded egyptian”. Like the later nineteenth century egyptians, Gordon follows the proportions and structure of modern face romans, especially in the nearly uniform widths of its capitals. This, along with the rounded ends to its serifs, gives Gordon an almost typewriter-like appearance. He draws freehand with India ink, avoiding french curves, and made the first sketches for Gordon with a round nibbed pen. The final drawings, with a cap height of 45 mm, were drawn with a technical pen and retouched with a brush and opaque white. The round nibbed pen leaves some mark throughout the Gordon type, but the italic most clearly retains the cursive quality of letters written directly with a pen. Georg Salden drew the first weight of Gordon as a headline face in 1975 and enlarged the family in 1978. The current text version was developed in the years 1983-1986.

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OpenType-Features
Gordon fonts are available in OpenType Basic (no features) and OpenType Expert (features included). OpenType features provide advanced typographic performance and can be accessed by almost all professional layout software.


Various numerals
Gordon Expert fonts come with proportional lining figures with varying widths and kerning. Oldstyle and tabular figures are available via features. The space glyph measures exactly half of the width of tabular figures, therefore it can easily be used for spaces in tabular composition.


Fractions
Numerals separated by a slash will be replaced automatically by real fractions.


Superiors
Standard figures will be replaced by superior figures.


Inferiors
Standard figures will be replaced by inferior figures.


Language Features
Correct typographical glyphs e.g. in Romanian (commaaccent replaces cedilla) and Turkish (dotaccent on the small caps lower case i).


The typographic layout features can be accessed via the Opentype palette (Illustrator) or the Character palette (InDesign and QuarkXpress). All glyphs available with the font can be seen in the Glyph palette.