Helvetica’s relatively less popular but ubiquitous cousin, Univers also got a facelift in 2010 after 30 years before Adrian Frutiger passed away under the name “Univers Next” [1], the most prominent aspect of the redesign being the return of 16 degree italics blessed by Frutiger himself.
In my view, Univers evokes a deep feeling of sophistication unlike any other font. Helvetica has the “grunge” and New York aesthetic after it took over the graphic design scene in the 70’s and 80’s whereas Univers was silently used in engineering manuals, control panels, branding, keyboards(Apple), movie credits [2] and UI without much fuss. It never became cool and edgy as Helvetica, never tried to be something it is not and doesn't have a following. I was lucky enough to visit the archives [3] in a obscure drawer at the Museum fur Gestaltung in Zurich, seeing the original manuscripts of Univers was an extraordinary feeling. Created in 1950, it is truly timeless and sits along with other giants of contemporary typefaces such as Futura and Eurostile, perhaps in the back row towards the corner.
Honestly, it's right there in the names. Helvetica projects a very Swiss Modern feel to it. Sometimes that's what you want, sometimes it's not. Univers is the most neutral typeface around that's got any personality at all. (I've always felt Haas Unica and many of the modern sans faces, especially the "brand" ones, have so little character to them that they're just completely bland and uninteresting.) Univers just... is. It's Frutiger's best design, and that's saying something.
Other favorites of mine include Trade Gothic (& friends) and Futura. I'm a huge fan of the 1930s-1970s "industrial" look, like you might find stamped on motor nameplates for heavy machinery, or the Apollo cockpits, or the IBM 360 consoles. These designs just scream _solid_ in a way that modern stuff... doesn't. (Maybe because it isn't.)
(Tangent to a tangent: does anyone know what typeface HP used on their equipment in the '70s through '90s? It's a very close cousin to Univers, but not identical. Maybe something internal only? I don't think it's just an odd cut of any of the usual suspects either. This is another typeface that has always connoted reliability and stuff that Just Works to me.)
Still, though, like you, I'd say Univers is my favorite more days than not. If I had to pick only one typeface, it'd be the one (more days than not)... just don't make me do that :)
NASA listed its preferred typefaces for workstation panels in Section 9.5.3.1.14.1 of NASA-STD-3000, the Man-System Integration Standards.[0] Engraved lettering, in order of preference, was set in Futura Demibold, Gorton Normal, or Gorton Condensed. They're also listed on page 113 of the Databook for Human Factors Engineers Volume I Human Engineering Data,[1] along with other very interesting design guidelines.
The Gorton typefaces were part of the MASTER COPY type templates[2][3] produced by George Gorton Machine Co. for its Pantograph engraving machines, and were commonly used for civilian and military aircraft panels produced from at least the late 40s onwards, possibly earlier (the linked catalog is from 1947). Since many of those contractors were heavily involved in Mercury and later Apollo, it makes sense that they used the same engraving machines and type. IBM also used Gorton when it started producing double shot keycaps for its keyboards in the 70s. There's also a modified version, Gorton Modified, that was created by Signature Plastics for keycaps that's still used today for SA profile caps.
Unfortunately, the Gorton plotter fonts have never been revived for digital use despite their interesting history.
Univers makes me think of something like 2001: A Space Odyssey where computers are just running everything and they've long since figured out how to do it efficiently.
If you like those fonts and have a Win10 installation somewhere, look for Bahnschrift. New variable type font that looks like DIN that’s included since some Windows 10 version.
I do have a copy of that HP font, it is very beautiful but cannot be used in anything as it 'screams HP' I have no idea though it I can share it without getting in trouble, no idea of the licencing status of that font.
You did mention its usage on pre-2003 Apple keyboards (Univers 57 Condensed Oblique), but I'm so nostalgic for that usage in particular that I wanted to share a photo for those who aren't familiar: https://i.imgur.com/eiSx7nn.jpg
This has nothing to do with it, but for hardware interfaces I grew to love DIN Next, which is inspired by the classic German Industry font DIN 1451 Engschrift and DIN1451 Mittelschrift
Big fan of Univers. The best thing about it for me is the sophistication of the letter spacing - Helvetica is just sort of banged together, and of course in modern usage is often set 'tight but not touching' for design reasons, but the spacing in Univers is so carefully done that the text has a lovely rhythm on the page. Frutiger was a genius.
Google's Roboto is a very close drop-in replacement for Helvetica. Almost the same metrics, slightly more "condensed"/DIN feel.
You may also consider FreeSans (GNU replacement for Helvetica) and Liberation Sans (which is a metric replacement for Arial, which is an alternative for Helvetica...)
Roboto to me feels very 'edgy' and active, and less neutral than Helvetica.
Most Linux systems come with the Nimbus fonts as part of the printer drivers, and Nimbus Sans is very close, but apparently (AFAIK) only has a limited character set unless you pay for the full version. GNU FreeFont is practically the same as Helvetica and Nimbus but gives you a much larger character set for free.
Liberation is not quite as geometric as Helvetica/FreeFont/Nimbus.
Here's a comparison of a few fonts (the first is San Francisco by Apple).
The 'r' and 't' in Liberation look quite a bit different than the first three, which are basically Helevetica clones. The ring in the 'b' also has a weird lower-left side. It's like 20% of the way to being a Serif font.
I haven't used MS fonts in a while but DejaVu reminds me very much of Arial, and to me it looks a lot worse. Especially the way the 'S' looks is quite awkward.
I just don't like the spacing with DejaVu... it's awkward is about all I can say about it. I do like Roboto a lot myself, and it's generally my default these days.
I find Univers much more stately than Helvetica. I think neither are very good for screen or small text, and obviously they weren’t designed for screen at the time, but you still see people specifying Helvetica variants on their webpages. Univers is very nice, but for anyone making any hobby website, maybe set it to system-ui,sans-serif or use Inter, or something modern with personality like Fira.
I have to say, the movie poster example does it no favors. But, then again, it seems to be most movie poster designer's prerogative to turn credits into vertical lines.
I'm partial to Futura and Gill Sans when it comes to sans-serif fonts. For display stuff, that is. Akzidenz-Grotesk is a pretty good text sans-serif.
I know it's a "design" website and all, but can't they just show an A-Z so I can look at it?
The official website has better representations, but is still full of a load of flashy animations and videos before you get to the actual font
https://www.monotype.com/fonts/helvetica-now
I was thinking the same thing and went through the whole article looking for a representation of the old font vs. the new font. It's my understanding that the only changes where kerning and slight shape changes but a picture of them side-by-side would be nice.
I did a little comparison between the bold weight of Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, and Helvetica Now, and the new typeface does look really, really nice. The letterforms aren't too noticeably different, but the kerning and relative positioning of the letters have been tweaked in such a way as to make the font appear more pleasing and readable (at least on my computer display). I'm also pleased this new font is available for use on websites via Fonts.com and in mockup work via SkyFonts. I'm definitely going to keep this in mind for future projects.
Interesting. The new design makes it seem like they're trying to get away from the political stigma of Helvetica, while also kind of poking fun at it. Whereas the idea of Helvetica was to evoke things like openness, transparency, neutrality, naturalness, etc., the new typeface strikes me as being much more opinionated, but in a purposely understated sort of way.
In a lot of ways it really looks like someone took the core ideologies of modern third-places and distilled them into a visual type system, which maybe says something about the privatization of formerly public spaces and infrastructure over the past 50+ years.
I mean if you watch the documentary Helvetica they do a pretty good job of explaining both the political statement the typeface was trying to make, the backlash against it as it was adopted/hijacked by corporations, and then the post-backlash period where we are now.
If you look at the new typeface it's clearly designed primarily for the needs of consumer products and advertising. They could have instead created a typeface that was purposely designed to look bad on consumer products and in advertising, but that's not the direction they went in. That's not an accident, it was a deliberate design decision.
Whereas the goal of the original typeface was to create a better society, the goal of the new one is basically to make it onto a Starbucks cup. It's not even a subtle difference, even though it's supposedly just an updated typeface the two are really night and day.
> the political statement the typeface was trying to make
Hmm, I think that a typeface is possibly the least effective way to make a political statement. Approximately zero people looking at it will impute a political message.
Less true than you might be aware yourself, actually.
Think of written Russian. Did you think of beautiful cursive Cyrillic as Pushkin would've written or some blocky reverse-R all caps propaganda text?
Wonder why literally everybody associates anything written in "German Gothic” (blackletter, actually, but I digress) is instantly associated with a guy with a Chaplin moustache but who isn't Chaplin?
Why Simplified Chinese was designed to look good with printed serifs which interfered with the Traditional script's typography?
And I'm not even a graphic designer or a “font nerd”...
Interesting fact: the Nazis actually were trying to get rid of that old German Type and were introducing Sans Fonts a lot.
So these old German typefaces are not inherently political and were only half a decade later adopted by neo nazis who have no deeper knowledge of it’s history. Or you could say, the extreme wish the Nazis had to look modern, got replaced by a wish to go back to a wrongly imagined past (which happens quite often on the extreme political fringes)
I do think there are some fonts that develop into having certain associations and meanings; I can't see how a font can be designed to have that association beforehand, but then, I'm not a designer or psychologist.
But there's a definite cultural meaning to certain fonts; what springs to mind is Impact (memes), comic sans (trolling / badly designed websites / your aunt's emails), and "gothic" fonts (nazis) (https://www.dafont.com/mtheme.php?id=4). I can imagine that font designers can take these fonts and their cultural associations and craft something new that evokes these.
Interestingly enough the Nazis actually tried to get rid of that old German typeface and were all for sans fonts. But these old German typeface was still so dominant during their regime, that in hindsight people (including neo Nazis) started connecting it with Nazis.
That's a good approximate, but I feel these kinds of "statements" are for a select few, and they'll have fun arguing the message's merits or lack-thereof. The rest of the world will continue on with these decisions of taste-makers serving as little more than a slight hum to the harmony of their lives.
It looks OK from the specimens, Neue Haas Grotesk is still the best Helvetica IMO
...
Font licensing is immoral rent seeking that takes advantage of a legal loophole and goes against the spirit of the law in major countries (typefaces are ineligible for copyright in at least the US and Japan), and I'm always disheartened by how many individual designers and companies have fallen for it.
> Typefaces cannot be protected by copyright in the United States (Code of Federal Regulations, Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e); Eltra Corp. vs. Ringer). The idea that typefaces (rather than fonts, which are computer software) cannot be copyrighted in the United States is black letter law. 37 C.F.R. § 202.1(e). Under U.S. law, typefaces and their letter forms or glyphs are considered utilitarian objects whose public utility outweighs any private interest in protecting their creative elements. However, there is a distinction between a font and a typeface. The machine code used to display a stylized typeface (called a font) is protectable as copyright. In 1992, the US Copyright Office determined that digital outline fonts had elements that could be protected as software. Since that time, the Office has accepted registration of copyright for digital vector fonts, such as PostScript Type 1, TrueType, and OpenType format files.
TL;DR
"On a computer, a typeface isn't a typeface so you have to pay us for it"
It's a common misconception that fonts are only the implementation of typefaces on computers. The specific weights and sizes of glyphs that comprise a font apply both to traditional typesetting and in its digital form.
A font file is more akin to a photograph than to the environment of which the photo is taken, so it's not clear why the morality of licensing photos and fonts would apply any differently.
Fonts are not like photos, they have hinting and kerning and conditional code that distinguishes a high quality font from crap. The glyph substitution table in OpenType fonts is of such complexity that it's been shown to be Turing complete. [https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html]
I wasn’t arguing that fonts are more or less complex than photos, but that from the perspective of implementation and/or copyright, fonts are more like photos (which are implicitly under copyright in the U.S.) than the subject of a photo (like, say, a pasture, a person or a horse).
In other words, a font is the specific representation of the concept, idea and qualities that define a typeface, as a photo is a representation of the qualities of its subject.
> A font file is more akin to a photograph than to the environment of which the photo is taken, so it's not clear why the morality of licensing photos and fonts would apply any differently.
See Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. Sorry in advance if I misunderstood your point
A while ago there was a case when the guy behind Maven Pro produced a very nice font that felt vaguely like Whitney. Lo and behold, not two days after he delisted it. When pressed for reasons, he said he got a letter from Hoefler himself on how one cannot get insipired by other people's work, chided him for being unoriginal and implied dire legal consequences of not taking it down immediately. Mind you, the point of contention was a _feel_ of the font.
You can find illicit copies of almost every font online for free if you know where to look. I suspect that puts a bit of a damper on the "generic clones" market strategy, since folks who _really_ want a cheaper alternative can get one for free.
Also, font companies are big and can threaten legal action, and even the threat of legal action can put people off, even if US law makes the font letter-shapes themselves not copyrightable.
I imagine it's a lot of work to reverse engineer all of the variants and all of the characters and all of the kerning rules etc. And then you can't advertise because the original name that everyone knows is trademarked.
>And then you can't advertise because the original name that everyone knows is trademarked.
Does that stop any counterfeit? You get it close enough, get the content visible and tank the price, and the name doesn’t stop squat.
And ofc naturally counterfeit markets spring up, where consumers go specifically with intent to purchase the fake (at severe discount), completely sidestepping the naming/marketing issue
Not disagreeing, but to be fair, Helvetica Neue (neue meaning new in German), did not age well either. I would assume the creators are aware of that, maybe even choosing that name to be in the tradition of Neue.
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here. What would make a comment like this interesting is specific information about what is bad in the diff and why. (That, plus maybe a bit less name-calling.)
I thought so too but dang's post history shows knowledge of type. Maybe dang is saying that calling this a grotesque font is name calling and poster should post more on why it is one.
Grotesque in the context of typography is a category of sans serif typefaces, specifically the one from which typefaces like Helvetica descend (they are usually called neo-grotesque). So the GP joke is based on a double meaning: on a first read it may seem an insult, but typographically he is just stating a quite obvious thing: that Helvetica Now is a grotesque typeface.
Does this mean Apple will license this and include it in macOS the way it does (presumably) with Helvetica and Helvetica Neue? I really have no idea how something like this happens.
Apple no longer use this front. They have created their own font, San Francisco, and started using it 3 to 4 years ago.
Edit: oh, I misunderstood! Apple might start using it, but they are not compelled to. A lot of other fonts such as Palatino have also been updated, but Apple doesn’t include them (yet).
Its not installed as an available font in MacOS, even though the its used for the UI. You can get it here if you want to use it within their licensing guidlines:
https://developer.apple.com/fonts/
The Verge also did an interview with the designers [1]; I prefer The Verge interview to the Creative Boom announcement [2] that's the article link at the time of writing, because the interview adds detail behind the design process and reads much less like a marketing announcement.
Truly the most amusing thing about the new typefaces are the alternate forms of certain iconic letters. The alternate forms are more classically resemble the legendary Akzidenz-Grotesk, in the tradition of paring back the few flourishes that Helvetica did have.
Ironically some of the alternate forms also make it resemble Arial, Monotype's famous metric-identical Helvetica clone, despite Monotype's long insistence that Arial is less grotesk and more humanist. But I also found the not-sure-if-serious dissing of Arial to be mostly signalling and snobbery. Other alternate forms seem a bit odd, as if someone was playing 'design your own sans-serif typeface' and filled out the missing cells of a big row-column table for completion, like here's a geometric 't', and a humanist 'l'.
But all that aside, the new typefaces look nice and are redrawn with purpose. The micro variant actually makes Helvetica usable at small sizes for the first time. It's a well-crafted family in the honor of a classic.
How do you "re-design" a font? Isn't that just making an entirely new font with a subtley different style? Or is this more backfilling tons of unpopulated UTF-8 characters that aren't covered by the original font?
The article mentions a single story lowercase 'a' and straight-legged capital 'R'... does anyone have a comparison for these? I'm unable to see it on https://www.monotype.com/fonts/helvetica-now
Why is the T presented as though it is always aligned relative to its middle bar? Not only would this be an incredibly bad idea, it is (fortunately) not done on the official site [0]
I'm not too knowledgeable about fonts (although I did learn how to spot Arial from Helvetica in that famous essay). Why does the uppercase R with its curvy "right leg" feel out of place with everything else that's straight?
I actually liked it. Often text logos can compete with the main text and headings in an article. Especially on mobile. Keeping the top nav all icons made the text of the article pop a bit more.
This may be different from my phone to yours, but the eyes bounced back and forth on Safari mobile. This definitely took attention away from the article.
Gotta say, the f and the t in the micro font are not good. At least while looking at it in my browser (firefox nightly on linux). They look like something out of comic sans.
Is it really "the most ubiquitous font"? I always notice when someone has used Helvetica itself rather than some generic sans serif clone and it's not that often.
In my view, Univers evokes a deep feeling of sophistication unlike any other font. Helvetica has the “grunge” and New York aesthetic after it took over the graphic design scene in the 70’s and 80’s whereas Univers was silently used in engineering manuals, control panels, branding, keyboards(Apple), movie credits [2] and UI without much fuss. It never became cool and edgy as Helvetica, never tried to be something it is not and doesn't have a following. I was lucky enough to visit the archives [3] in a obscure drawer at the Museum fur Gestaltung in Zurich, seeing the original manuscripts of Univers was an extraordinary feeling. Created in 1950, it is truly timeless and sits along with other giants of contemporary typefaces such as Futura and Eurostile, perhaps in the back row towards the corner.
Univers was, is and always will be.
It’s my favorite font.
[1] https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/univers-next/
[2] https://www.dafont.com/forum/read/5633/what-s-the-font-for-m...
[3] https://www.eguide.ch/en/designer/adrian-frutiger/