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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.
https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/... To bad they do not show the font in the article.
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.
What exclusive agreement? Adobe licensed Helvetica and shipped it with pretty much every DTP-related product they had on any platform. Helvetica is in every Postscript printer, for example. Those aren't Mac only.
Helvetica was never cheap to license which meant that Microsoft went hunting elsewhere pretty early on and licensed the cheap (in every sense of the word) knock-off "Arial". But that was a Microsoft decision, it wasn't made by Monotype or Apple.
You can buy it here.
I agree it isn't ubiquitous, most of the time a sans-serif font that looks like Helvetica is a knock off or a font inspired by it but redesigned for a specific purpose like the Rail Alphabet. But occasionally you get to see it in its glory, and it has to be said, it's one of the most beautiful fonts in the world.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.