Press Gothic is a revival of Aldo Novarese’s Metropol typeface, released by Nebiolo in 1967 as a competitor to Stephenson Blake’s Impact (designed by Goeffrey Lee). Though Metropol enjoyed a few short months of popularity and use in Italy, Germany and France, Impact won the technological outlasting battle by moving on to film type then to computer outlines bundled with mainstream software, while Metropol never made it past the metal state until now. Too bad really, since this is one of the few faces that could have played well with all the horrendous stretch'n'squeezing of the 1970s.

Just like its inspiration, Press Gothic aims to be a fresh alternative to big economical poster fonts with clear sans serif forms and an urgent, strong, yet elegant design appeal.

In the summer of 2008, Press Gothic underwent a major linguistic and aesthetic reworking for an international publishing company. The result of this on the retail side are new small capitals and biform/unicase additions to the main font, as well as expanded language support that includes Cyrillic, Greek, Turkish, Baltic, Central and Eastern European, Maltese, and Esperanto.

Press Gothic Pro, the OpenType version, combines all three fonts into one, taking advantage of the small caps feature, and the stylistic alternate feature for the biform shapes.