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Monotype Launches the First Redesign in 35 Years of the World's Most Ubiquitous Font, Helvetica (creativeboom.com)
Monotype today introduced the Helvetica Now typeface, a new family of fonts that have been carefully and respectfully re-drawn for the modern era. From a report: Consisting of 48 fonts and three optical sizes, the typeface has been produced from size-specific drawings and with size-specific spacing and is the first redesign in 35 years of what many argue is the world's most ubiquitous font, Helvetica. Every character has been redrawn and refit and a host of useful alternates have been added to help brands meet modern-day branding challenges. Espousing the simplicity, clarity, timelessness and global appeal of the typeface's storied tradition, the Helvetica Now design aims to be more sophisticated and graceful than its predecessors. An extremely popular and well-known typeface, the Helvetica family has been used by countless brands and creative professionals, in millions of designs since its inception. The typeface embodies clean and versatile design, and the Helvetica Now typeface continues the tradition established by the Helvetica and Neue Helvetica families while introducing a number of improvements.
Ubiquitious? No. Apple only? Yes.
I fucking hate Helvetica because of Monotype's exclusive deal with Apple.
I'm still waiting for an update/refresh of Papyrus typeface!
How else will James Cameron complete the next 17 Avatar movies?
https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/... To bad they do not show the font in the article.
How difficult is it to show a side-by-side diagram instead of a bunch of mangled composite images of bottles and cut up posters and things?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I would have never thought a documentary about a font would be interesting, but Helvetica the documentary was actually very interesting. I'd recommend it as an interesting watch on a lazy weekend.
Can I have a subscription?
They have their place all right, but I hate it when the main text in books is printed out in sans-serif fonts. I instinctively feel that I am being treated condescendingly when reading such books.
Does GNU plus LINUX include Helvetica Now?
How does Helvetica Now compare? Something that visually shows the difference would have been useful. I can't tell, either at the article or at Monotype's website.
Meanwhile, also just announced was the free typeface Public Sans, "a strong, neutral typeface for text or display" (https://public-sans.digital.gov/). That page lets you see samples, but the github page (https://github.com/uswds/public-sans) shows excellent side-by-side and overlay comparisons. That is how a new/updated typeface should be introduced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Helvetica is one of the standard fonts in PostScript (and therefore PDF). And ghostscript is a free-and-found-on-linux PostScript interpreter. I don't know what exactly it uses but it looks like Helvetica to me.
Wake me up when they refresh Comic Sans!
#DeleteChrome
... for all tastes and purposes, I clearly see no reason to ever buy a commercial one.
Aren't "Source Sans Pro" and "Noto" already "professional enough" alternatives to Helvetica for you?
And here for the more playful purposes: https://www.1001freefonts.com/
All you need is Times New Roman.
Times has been and remains by far the most used font in print. And for sans serif/electronic use, it is Arial, since a) all windows devices default to it, b) it's a core web font.
Helvetica is #1 on a list of fonts used by graphic designers,, chiefly because it is the default sans font on Macs.
The author should be embarrassed for parroting so much meaningless drivel.
Marketroids are dumbing down the English language.
So why did they call their new fonf 'Helvetica Now' when thatg name is so easy to confuse with 'Helvetica' and they are completely different fonts? (OK so ther're both in the sans-serif class)
I hated Xerox for the same reason. Before it was common on the Mac, it was licensed to Xerox, which meant it was near impossible to find for GEOS on my C64. GEOS would have been so much more usable with a decent sans-seirf system font.
why not link Monotype's site with samples, instead of that eyecandy page?
https://www.monotype.com/fonts...
...So, what's the next "in" font? Wingdings? Groovey!
Table-ized A.I.
This just means that you don't know what kerning is, probably don't need or use ligatures, don't reproduce the font at very large sizes, and don't need to ever convert the font to tool paths (such as a cutter, or router).
If you did, you would know that there is a WORLD of difference between most freebie fonts and ones that have been painstakingly worked over.
You're not supposed to cut and paste the press release.
Monotype isn't into the whole "giving things away for free" bit (Helvetica Now is $42 for each version). If it's in Linux (legally), it's not Helvetica.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
So it's more everywhere than the other things that are everywhere?
Helvetica is best in the way that it is sort of kinda an acceptable replacement for Futura if you want/need an alternative and have money to burn for stupid and obscenely high license fees. This new one is no exception. I totally get and applaud IBM for calling it quits with this stupid shit and building their own font and releasing it as open font after spending tens of millions on licensing fees for 7+ decades.
As for Helvetica now: They actually improved Helvetica, AFAICT, that's neat, but Futura still owns the crown and will probably only lose it when we as a culture switch to a different alphabet or something. That's my opinion anyway.
I for one am sticking with Open Sans because it's just as acceptable a not-Futura Font and you don't have to deal with the douchebags at linotype when you use it.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
None of which explains this level of douchieness:
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Is it possible some copyright is expiring and something is going into the public domain? So all action must be taken to preserve and perpetuate the income stream of the rent seekers?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Jesus that is a thick slathering of marketing speak if I ever saw some.
Hahahahaha. Good luck, guys.
It's difficult to say, "yeah, we haven't touched this in 30+ years so that will be $1500 for the files" so they're going to fluff out a lot of man hours, mostly marketing and advertising bullshit, and then watch the checks roll in. Mono(poly)type at its finest.
An ideal font in my view is one that essentially gets out of the way and lets your brain focus on the actual content, and this one misses that mark. Looking at samples of actual blocks of text, there are two visibly different baselines: one for letters made of generally straight strokes like i, f, t, and v, and a slightly lower one for letters containing a loop like a, b, e, g, and s. It's just a pixel or two, but more than enough to be a distraction. Unclear if it might become less noticeable over time, but I don't get what useful purpose it could serve.
Come on now, I think we all know what keming is.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Mod parent up. Links given above, made active:
Public Sans Regular.
Github page.
Public Sans seems far better than Libre Franklin.
Every serif expunged, every trace of humanity. Clean cold and impersonal, Helvetica is the font of the robotic future where practical reigns supreme and there is no room for art. It is the font of Big Corporations and Big Government, the font of authority and control. There is no place for friendliness or personality in Helvetica. No warmth, no character, no love.
...omphaloskepsis often...
But if I have "download font-file viruses and worms" turned off, then webfonts are NEVER downloaded and NEVER rendered. Does that mean that I don't count? Perhaps I should recompile the browser with a "download webfonts to /dev/nul at least 1,000,000 times for each reference" option?
Just to make them get their money's wort, of course.
No one cares.
I know very well what kerning is and what bad kerning looks like. But fonts like "Source Sans Pro" have none of that. And while Adobe is unable to write a single not-security-flawed line of code, they are still competent in authoring fonts.
Actually, going back to cuneiform will eliminate a lot of hate speech for two reasons. First, there were fewer hateful words in the past. Second, only educated people will know the language.
That actually sounds pretty typical for photographic/typographic work. The license fee depends on the number of copies you print out. Back in the print newspaper/magazine days, the license fee for a photograph depended on the page it would be used on (cover was most expensive, pages near the front were more expensive than ones near the back), coverage (full page was more expensive than half page was more expensive than quarter page), and number of copies which would be printed.
For online sites, that last one would correspond to the number of page views. Not saying it's right or the best way to do it. Just that their license is pretty much a direct transferal of print license contract to online use.
Helvetica is everywhere for a reason. So is Times Roman. Classic typefaces, what type is supposed to look like.
The last time I did serious font research was designing maps for a GPS-based asset-tracking system. I wanted a font that was distinctive, but not too distinctive. After some looking through Adobe's font catalog I settled on Myriad. It worked fine until word came from On High that we must emulate the visual appearance of Google Maps. So be it.
I use Souvenir for my resume, BTW.
...laura
Sounds like the pay-as-you-go model from Adobe. No longer can you outright buy PS/LR, install and run it for 10 years. Then MS copied this with Office365. Subscriptionware spreads to FONTS!!!!
There are tens of thousands of absolutely free fonts, down to a few dozen if you want something that looks like Helvetica (old, new, whatever). And of those at least 3 will have been well finished in terms of kerning and in-font details.
Pay? Per style within a family of fonts? Twice the price of many other fonts, and then only good for N impressions? NO.
nothing will ever match the elegance, austerity, and gravitas of comic sans.
Mess with them Helvetica nerds: http://fancyham.com/shirts/Fan...
Sometime soon, Adobe is will let PS and the rest of their software either go subscription or the way of Flash...They don't really care much. Adobe is very much a (scary) data analytics company from now into the foreseeable future...
Have they made any effort to make the uppercase 'I' distinct from the lowercase 'l'?
Fonts are a technology. It is an interesting tech, because there is a lot of art involved, but they are still a technology to enable people to read words. And with any technology there are a many trade-offs for different use cases. And they have a loooooooong history, primarily drive by the tech that was available back then.
For instance, the font used to highway signage was painstakingly designed to enable a driver at high speed to see and read a road sign at the maximum distance possible. This was meticulously tested at the Federal Test Road in Texas.
The problem is the glare of headlights shining on the sign, which blurs the letterforms. The typeface has a large X-height and the counters (the spaces in the font) are as big as possible to minimize the impact of the blurring.
It means that fonts like these (Vectora and Interstate are prime examples) are good for signage but make crummy normal headline fonts for corporate brochures.
Another example: Time New Roman does not have ver fine details because it was explicitly designed for newsprint in the 30s and printers in those days for newspapers were printed on rough, cheap paper and printed very fast so the letterforms need to be robust. This is also why Adobe used it for PostScript. Times was also explicitly designed with a narrower running width so as to put more words on a line, thereby saving paper and ink.
There are also the very fint details of fonts involving ink trapping and the fact that the lines are thinner in the design than they look because the ink flowed around the printed letter, in effect blurring it (a problem that laser printers do not really have).
And then the whole can of worms of different cultural and technological impact that fonts have. Fonts were desgned in specific places and times this process was driven by the technology available at that time. You see different fonts in use in France (lots of old thin Modernist fonts) Switzerland (Helvetica and Univers everywhere) and the USA.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Adobe has one of the most competent digital typography teams on the planet.
I am going to visit the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp on Friday where the original dies for Garamond are displayed.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
I know you're just informing here, and not advocating for this pricing model. But I have to point out the biggest flaw with it.
With print, the cost of printing is pretty high. You're only going to send one copy of anything to a person, and you're only going to send copies to people who you can make money off of.
With the internet. The cost of "printing" is almost free, and you send a new "copy" every time a user looks at your content. Imagine getting charged for printing a magazine with Helvetica in it, then getting charged every time someone picked up that magazine, then every time they turned a page. And worse, most people who visit your website don't make you any money. Usually only ad clickers do. The pricing scheme is whack, and there's really no excuse for it. It's 2019. These people can't keep pretending the internet is new.
I was unable to find a place to download the Public Sans font.
Do you have a link?