Smelvetica – Helvetica the way it was intended to be
tholman.com
tholman.com
This font is the kind of stuff that gives me nightmares.
This should be made a felony.
Wow, that's evil
After buying her Interrobang piece a while back, we asked her to make a Keming can to go with it. Here they are together:
https://geary.smugmug.com/Art/i-qCBqjqb/A
I love the way she made it so you can see both the "m" and the "rn".
Thank you for making this world a better place.
I remember there was an algorithms book that was set in this typeface that was literally difficult to read. It made it harder to process the content.
The way things look is important.
Which?
I remember the book was laid out using TeX though.
Serious: Neue Haas Grotesk is Helvetica the way it is supposed to be: http://www.fontbureau.com/nhg/
Pretty sure the license won’t allow you to do any modification to the font installed on your system.
I remember watching the documentary of the same name, and wondering how everyone could be so fond of what's ultimately a very plain font. Now, Garamond or Bookman — those are fonts! All just a matter of taste, of course.
I just wish I could peek inside the head of someone in the previous century, witnessing the birth of sans serifs such Akzidenz Grotesk - THAT must have been Earth shaking.
And I'm with you on Garamond - I have an entire side project's brand built around it. We outsourced the second iteration of its website (because Shopify is a bit of a dog to dev for on Windows... for me anyway) and the person we outsourced to thought it best to strip out our entire brand language and replace with whatever rounded sans (replete with flat colour scheme) was doing the web fashion rounds of two years ago. We're still putting the pieces back to this day! :)
That sort of thing's my marker of a poor 'designer' — someone who has no concept of how to work with what they're given, instead needing to start from scratch. In that vein, if you can't work to other's rules, you're just a decorator.
I'll go one step further and claim that the times i visited a website where the selected fonts actually improved over browser defaults can be counted on one hand.
Granted, it's a Kindle Touch, I don't know if I would choose it again on one of the newer models (not that I would buy one, Amazon's locking up of those models makes a thriving homebrew scene impossible).
So we had everyone stand at the back of a medium sized conference room and do a poor man’s eye exam. Verdana had the smallest font that was still readable. Narrower font means less line wrapping and text clipping. None of us knew any font lore so I didn’t learn until much later that this was a design goal of Verdana, but I’d say mission accomplished.
Corporate tools at headquarters didn’t like it, and with no context demanded we change it back to a “normal” font. Apparently I’m still upset about this.
I dislike it as it gets larger though.
These days I generally agree except for things like logos or games, or specialized applications like the dyslexia-friendly fonts. It’s hard to beat rendering immediately for most uses.
As usual, learning to see good fonts is a matter of recognizing bad ones first. You'd want to look at reviews of bad fonts, more-or-less detailed.
Then there's also the matter of the font style: a decorative font may easily have an untasteful twang to it (e.g. “playful” ad fonts), or be overly pretentious for the task. This is also a matter of looking at a lot of examples and thinking of what they make you feel.
These are just the basics, and designers sometimes diss fonts that look fine to me. But these help. Also, IMO learning to see and apply the proximity principle covers a lot of design, including typography (e.g. line spacing and paragraph positioning).
I haven't read the latest version which says it's updated for the web, but even the copy I have is amazing.