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.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/9/18302057/helvetica-now-new... [2] https://www.creativeboom.com/resources/monotype-launches-the...