Agency is a dramatically square, narrow font family that works best at large sizes for punchy display use. It is especially useful when you have to work within a narrow space and short lines. Agency’s narrowness and towering height echo the shapes of New York City skyscrapers from the 1920s and 1930s.
Where a less squared-off design might have curves, Agency has sharp but very slightly rounded corners, or straight, slightly slanting lines. It is not meant for body text; it flourishes best in headlines or very short bits of large text. The quirky, angular sharpness of the font’s design can make it a dramatic contrast with paragraphs set in a more restrained text font.
Agency was first designed as an all-caps headline typeface by typeface designer Morris Fuller Benton in 1930. David Berlow added lowercase letters and expanded Agency into a digital type family for Font Bureau in the early 1990s.
