For extreme, in-your-face Art Deco exuberance, it’s hard to beat Broadway. Its fat, fat main strokes and its skinny little thin strokes contrast dramatically, and the way its lowercase letters hug themselves together, even the ones with bits that usually stick out like ‘b’ and ‘g’ and ‘j’ and ‘q’, makes it fit a lot of oomph into a small vertical space.
It’s not a typeface for text, or even small labels and subheads. Broadway wants to be used big and bold, whether in all-capital letters or in mixed upper- and lowercase. It has no italic and no other weights. Many of Broadway’s letters look halfway between black and white: the capital ‘O’ for instance consists of a huge semicircle of black on the left and an even huger open white space on the right, enclosed with a thin semicircle like a narrow necklace.
As you might expect, Broadway was designed in the Roaring Twenties. Type designer Morris Fuller Benton designed it for the American Type Founders (ATF).
