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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.
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.
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.
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?...
I find the business of licensed uses of fonts interesting. It made sense for printed documents, but it gets hairy now with CSS being able to download custom fonts.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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.
It uses a drop-in replacement look-alike, Nimbus Sans, which was donated to the GhostScript project by the foundry URW++. The foundry donated a full drop-in replacement font package covering the basic 35 PostScript standard fonts.
More info:
http://www.tug.org/fonts/deuts...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
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 ruined his apple rant
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.
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.
(The parent was posted as a reply to the wrong comment, mods.... I guess I have enough karma, so if you could mod this down as redundant I'd be very grateful for your hiding my idiocy.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
AFAIR you couldn't change the system font.
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
I doubt that. It was only 30 years ago and lots of teens used it. I was one.
If you're Jim DeFrisco, thanks for the work!
My 64 had a REU and a 1351 mouse in high school and that was very useful!
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.
I used GEOS! And I don't remember Pete. He must have not been in the cool crowd.
load "linux",8,1
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.
No. I will not buy it. I will never buy it. It is a fucking font. It is not worth billions of dollars. I'll use cuneiform on clay tablets before I give Monotype a dime.
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...
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
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...
Arial is much more ubiquitous than Helvetica, but it has the advantage that all the characters have the same width so you can basically replace the font directly.
And since Helvetica was licensed to ADOBE for use in PostScript means Helvetica is also used as one of the standard fonts (Times New Roman is the other one) in PDF, which is very ubiquitous. Times was chosen because the first laser printers were very rough and the font was designed for newspaper print in the 30s during, an application where speed of printing took precedence over quality. Times was explicitly designed for rough and ready printers in the old times and when the first rough and ready digital laser printer came out it was a good choice. This was achieved by not having and fine details in the characters that would get lost or damaged by rough paper and ink (and low-res laser toner). It was also designed with a smaller running width so that you could fit more words per line.
I imagine Helvetica was chosen for similar reasons.
Apple then later licensed the PDF imaging tech from Adobe and thus, indirectly, from Monotype but there was no exclusive anything. But since they used an embedded version of PDF/Postscript (and still do) they have to pass some licensing fees to MonoType.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
You hate a group of people because they use a specific typeface? What else triggers you?
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
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
No, chiefly because it is the default Sans on PostScript/PDF which is what Apple uses widely on MacOS/X
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
No. I will not buy it. I will never buy it. It is a fucking font. It is not worth billions of dollars.
Agreed. It's not worth billions. It's worth $35 which is what you can have it for. Or do you say that in general you don't think creative arts are worth paying for? In which case I wish you from the bottom of my heart a "fuck you".
I was unable to find a place to download the Public Sans font.
Do you have a link?