‘Text’ is for a layout that involves large amounts of text, such as a newspaper, magazine or website. ‘Micro’ shines at small sizes and is intended for the mobile, tablet and smartwatch. What this really means is that the drawings of the letters are optical illusions - different when compared side by side but appearing the same when used at their intended sizes. Helvetica Now is a bundle of three optical sizes - ‘Micro’, ‘Text’ and ‘Display’, named for the uses they are best suited for. Helvetica Now is said to have been redrawn keeping all of this in mind. Today, fonts aren’t just used by designers, and their application is extending to new media too. Screens have become smaller, and their resolutions a lot sharper. In the last few years, a number of brands, like Lufthansa and American Airlines, replaced Helvetica Neue with custom-made fonts in their logo - a possible prompt for the font’s redesign. The Helvetica Now family comes with 40,000 characters, carefully redesigned for 21st-century users. This is the Helvetica that most users are familiar with and hold strong opinions about. Still, its widespread use can be chalked to the fact that it was licensed by Apple and Xerox, and was available on Mackintoshes everywhere. A big criticism was also that Helvetica Neue was too tightly spaced - it fit a lot of text in a smaller space, but the letters had no room to breathe. It was a more accessible package, but there were design compromises made to accommodate its many styles, and some limitations from the analogue system carried over to the digital files. This new typeface made sense of all the variations and created a systemised type family for a digital age. In 1983, one of the font’s first planned redesigns led to the release of Helvetica Neue. The font was modified slightly to fit these new systems over and over again, at the cost of its original design. Soon, Helvetica grew from a letterpress font (for which every character needed to be a physical object) to embrace new printing technologies. It was an easy sell - post-war designers wanted a modern-looking, neutral typeface, and Helvetica delivered.
USING HELVETICA NOW ALTERNATE CHARACTERS FREE
In a marketing plan akin to sending free goodies to social media influencers, popular Swiss graphic designers were encouraged to adopt the new font. Originally created by designers Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann in Switzerland, the typeface found passionate fans (and foes) across the world. When Helvetica was born back in 1957, san-serif typefaces were having a bit of a moment. It’s a font that has its own film, and now, it’s back in the spotlight - Monotype, an American company that makes fonts (among other things) and which currently owns the licensing rights to Helvetica, has given the popular typeface a new upgrade. Variations of the font have been used liberally - you may have spotted it on the Jeep logo, across the subway system signage in New York, and even (briefly) as the default option across Apple devices.
0 kommentar(er)
