Helvetica Now Variable | Hacker News Reader

Helvetica Now Variable

monotype.com

320 pointsbpierre189 comments

Fantastic font, now infinitely malleable! Unfortunately it is expensive, and you can't just buy it and use it, you have to renew the license annually. https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/helvetica-now-variable?tab...

And my use case isn't even covered: include in a web application that will be downloaded and installed by customers. My current choice is OpenSans https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans

How does this work? Normally I download and install TTF files and install them on my computer. How are licensed fonts work? Is there some kind of proprietary installation?

If you violate their agreement, and they find it, they sue you.

You probably can't use it for any commercial purpose. Locally they can't really do much about it.

Copyright licensing is entirely a legal construct. Some people attempt to make DRM to enforce it, but it's certainly not a requirement.

For example, if you visit my webpage, your computer will download the copyrighted text from it and save it in your cache.

If you (the end user) download and install a font on your machine, or buy an OS with it pre-installed, then you (the end user) are paying the licensing for it.

If you (the website operator) link to a font from your CSS file so end users' browsers will download and render text with it, then you (the website operator) are paying the licensing fees.

That is the most insane thing ive heard. Am i to pay extra for every person passing by the billboard ive designed?! Who thought this was ok?! So i could go broke if my website goes viral for the wrong reasons?! Insanity.

Simple solution, just use an open font!

Look at Inter. Absolutely the best open source font I found. Also variable!

Another great option and my current favorite is the Source Family from Adobe. They are open source and variable, and have a full family of Serif, Sans and Monospace fonts.

https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-serif

https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans

https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro

I used Source Code Pro all the time until I found out about Comic Mono.

I went there and expected something like comic sans. I was blown away, until I realized I disabled webfonts a long time ago.

I had a proper look at it after that. It isn't even half bad. I never disliked comic sans for the use cases it was intended for, and a derived coding font is a fun project.

> Unfortunately it is expensive, and you can't just buy it and use it, you have to renew the license annually.

Not even that. If you want it for a web page you have to pay in blocks of page views. In my mind that moves it from "eh" to "LOL no". These are licensing terms for people who want the name.

Typefaces should not be copyrightable. Print ones are not, it makes no sense that digital ones are.

Print fonts are copyrightable.

In the United States, the shapes of typefaces are not eligible for copyright.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...

Ah, so that's how knock-off fonts work. You can reproduce essentially the same output (the typeface) as long as the code that produces it is distinct (the font).

But in France and Germany but not Austria despite the Vienna Agreement for the Protection of Type Faces and their International Deposit.

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/dfat/seldoc/1973/2203.htm...

The digital one is considered as code. In some countries even the print one has copyright.

> Fonts should not be copyrightable. Print fonts are not, it makes no sense that digital ones are.

I agree with your first statement, except that I'm stuck re-wording it to "I wish fonts weren't copyrightable" because I can't find an argument/proper analogy that works.

I don't know the details around copyright law, IANAL (surprise!) either, so I'm looking at this from an incredibly naive legal perspective -- that almost everything is copyrightable (in the United States) except for facts. Since copyright law predates digital fonts, you have to look at things they are most like to see what applies (and find a judge to agree, but that part seems to be the simple). Print fonts are not copyrightable. I'm not sure why they're not copyrightable -- were they explicitly excluded (i.e. there's a law on the books that says "Print fonts are not copyrightable"[0]) or were they found to be "like this other thing that is excluded, so they are excluded, too".

Then, looking at what's similar about print fonts versus digital ones, there's not really a whole lot other than that they're "concepts" that represent letters in this context. One is chiseled out of some form of metal or strong material, is that size/shape permanently and though there's science/research behind it, for whatever reason, it didn't represent enough of a kind of work to warrant protection. A font has a lot in common on the surface, but underneath it's a program[1]. One could extend that to say "bitmap fonts are so similar to print fonts that they should be excluded" but one cannot say the same for TTF/others and I'd imagine.

The bigger problem, though, is that exclusions to copyright are basically never made any longer. This used to be more common, but the entertainment industry's money/power continues to extend copyright in ways that benefit them to the exclusion of other industries -- particularly software -- the large players have a lot of money, so a law that was designed to equally protect invention/creation (really, patent law was by-and-large aimed at helping individual inventors protect their invention/give them a chance to capitalize it against abusive larger competition) ends up helping secure the existing players positions.

Now, I don't know if anyone wants Warner Brothers to make Mickey Mouse cartoons, but I suspect there's a less heavy-handed approach to protecting long-held IP while not extending copyright, basically, indefinitely for everything.

So yeah, all of that to say "No, I don't think fonts should be copyrightable, either ... but I can say that for so many things and there's so much wrong with Copyright these days that it warrants revisiting a reset/rethink." Maybe one day!

[0] It won't be that sentence, it'll be a page worth of explaining why it doesn't fall into the various defined kinds of works.

[1] TTF hinting is turing complete.

To answer your specific question as to why fonts are not copyrightable in the US, 37 C.F.R. § 202.1(e) specifies that a "typeface as typeface" is not copyrightable.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/37/202.1

In the US, "typefaces", ie. the shapes of the letters, generally are not. "Fonts", ie. the programs that draw the letters, are copyrighted as software, as something of a workaround. For more reading on the history here Typographica has a succinct overview[0].

[0] https://typographica.org/on-typography/copyright-protection-...

Silly question, so how do type foundries prevent someone from literally copying the TTF, WOFF, EOT files - and then rebrand a font as their own?

Will the bits/bytes of a TTF be different if two people produced identically the exact same shape of the letters?

EDIT: let me clarify a bit. The GP said that the shape of the letters is not copyrighted in the US. Which implies to me that if Helvetica has the exact shape of the letter "s" to be like so, and if I were to manually trace the exact same shape (curves, width, height of the letter, etc) that I can do that and resell it (or open source it)

What I'm asking is, what prevents someone from skipping the step all together of tracing every letter in the Helvetica alphabet and instead, just digitally copies the TTF font file?

Would the TTF font file I create from a manual tracing of the Helvetica alphabet be different than if I simply digitally copied the official Helvetica TTF file?

Licenses are generally sold to medium sized to large companies who would not risk legal action pursuing what you suggest. There is money to spread around anyway. Fonts and branding are nothing compared to the upkeep for C-level execs.

The same way any company prevents you from copying any computer program and rebranding it as your own. Lawyers. Vector fonts count as computer programs.

Users agree to a EULA which stipulates how they can and can't use the font. This contract provides the legal basis on which a foundry would pursue someone for suspected misuse. Here's Monotype's EULA for Helvetica Now[0], Section 9 specifically addresses copies and derivative works. From there, it becomes a legal matter.

[0] https://www.fonts.com/font/monotype/helvetica-now/licenses#

But how can you differentiate a Helvetica created font file from a font file where I manually traced every Helvetica alphabet identically.

Font cloning is a thing.

Font tracing is usually done by printing out the character to be traced at very large scale -- I've seen about 12" x 12" -- and placing it directly on a large digitizing tablet. A sequence of strokes / points is collected for the outline of the character, and then curves of somewhat reduced degree are fit to those strokes / points to both reduce font data size and reduce the impact of errors, inaccuracies, and quantization in the data capture.

Even at this huge scale, and with this amount of effort, the outline of your character will be very close to -- visually identical to! -- the starting character, but not exact. As a result, the generated font program will be quite different. For example, it may use a different number of control points for equivalent curves.

Now, one can imagine automating this process differently: Take a font file, digitally render each character, perturb it a small amount, and resynthesize the strokes to generate a new, different program for a visually identical font. This is generally against the terms of service for the initial font, however, which would make it a legal matter...

> This is generally against the terms of service for the initial font, however, which would make it a legal matter...

I doubt there's anything in the ToS for most fonts prohibiting me from rendering a short story that just so happens to contain every character and post it online for everyone to enjoy. I couldn't possibly predict that my friend who doesn't even know the name of the font, let alone ever agreed to any ToS, would take that render and trace all the characters on it.

Note that I generically said "render", not image or raster, since from my understanding, an SVG or vector PDF render of the font (not embedded, but turned into paths) wouldn't be any more copyrightable than a raster, but far easier to clone.

A font isn't just the letterforms, there's also all the metrics, spacing, kerning, and OpenType features like ligature replacement. Also modern OpenType releases contain many languages which makes the metrics even more complex. Metrics are also very refined to the point that with some fonts if they weren't copied completely there would be problems.

I suppose if you manually traced Helvetica letters, then they might have a case for misusing their font. After all, there isn't a licensing option that allows you to use the font as a template.

But what if the tracing was done by a consumer who visited a website containing the Helvetica™ font?

IANAL, but in the past I've heard the term "impliedd license" applied to things like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_license

I'd assume the license for viewing the file is implied, but I have no clue if it would hold up in court if you viewed the file -> traced the output (which is copying the typeface, not the font.)

If you copied the .ttf file and sold it, it's a copyright violation just like any software copying. The foundry takes you to court.

If you copy by hand (at what size? at what accuracy? do you include the same hinting and ligatures?) the file will not be bit-for-bit identical. The foundry cannot sue.

If you trace each letter of a font to create a new font, you are creating a new font "program", even if your new "program" is very similar to what you would get from just copying the file. The traced font would have a different colour than the copied font. (https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23)

> What I'm asking is, what prevents someone from skipping the step all together of tracing every letter in the Helvetica alphabet and instead, just digitally copies the TTF font file?

What stops you from copying any copyright-protected software? Technically, usually, very little (sometimes DRM). But, mostly, its social/economic constraints like your (or your business’) particular tolerance for legal exposure.

Point stands. These ought to not be royalty driven.

I'm not sure I follow. Whether or not the typeface is eligible for copyright, the pricing model and terms of use are at the discretion of the font creator.

"How a font is sold is up to the discretion of the font creator" and "a font should not be sold on a sliding cost scale" aren't mutually exclusive -- the latter's pretty clearly asserting an opinion about reasonable pricing models and terms of use. There are a lot of things people do that they're perfectly within their rights to do that someone else might strongly believe they shouldn't, right?

Personally, I don't like the idea of selling fonts with costs governed by web page impressions, either, no matter how common it may be in the industry. I genuinely like having what I consider to be nice typefaces for my web sites, but this kind of licensing makes it incredibly impractical for me to use most commercial options.

Of course, but the "point" in question is whether a typeface (or font) should be copyrightable.

That type designs are not protected is a gross injustice. The time and effort involved in creating a type design is significant. Alas, when the type industry had the resources to lobby to have copyright law changed, they were making a lot of money from stealing each others' designs and chose to lobby the opposite. There was an ill-fated effort in the 90s to lobby for typeface design protection (I was part of it as the editor of a typography magazine) but it never achieved any measurable success.

It's not worth the hell that would ensue with people suing each other because their letters look too similar. Letters have to look similar -- that's the whole damn point!

That art styles are not protected is a gross injustice. The time and effort involved in creating an art style is significant. Alas, when the art industry had the resources to lobby to have copyright law changed…

Type designs not being protected by copyright has benefits, too. Afaik, they're still protected by patent. (Not everything has to be copyright law! That's something the “intellectual property” lobby seems to be wilfully ignoring.)

A design patent is available, but the bar for a design patent is very high and the income for most type designs is enough to maybe buy a nice dinner for two.¹ Copyright registration is easy and cheap.³

People who argue against type design copyright fall into at least one of three camps: (a) they have no idea what it takes to make a good typeface, (b) their ability to distinguish typefaces doesn't go much farther than distinguishing sans/serif/monospace (if even that), and/or (c) they hope to be able to use other people's designs for their own benefit.

1. Retail sales of typefaces is a ridiculously unprofitable business, which is part of why every nearly independent foundry/type reseller of measurable size is ending up under the umbrella of Monotype Imaging. The handful of designers who have made a living from type design either are employed as staff designers for Adobe/Microsoft/Monotype, do high-value custom designs for publishing clients (although these are becoming increasingly scarce as publishers who still do print are less willing to spend money on quality²) or, the big one but probably gone for good now, embedded fonts in printers (Arthur Baker's deal with HP, he claimed, left him set for life financially).

2. A big part of Font Bureau's early capital came from producing a custom version of Palatino for the gravure pages of Playboy that would match the printed output on the offset pages. There's probably a whole book to be written about the ways in which Hugh Hefner spent Playboy money in ways that nominally benefited the magazine but had a bigger impact in providing cash to artistic endeavors (most notably writers) that wouldn't otherwise see much money.

3. And optional. If registration occurs after an infringement, the copyright holder can only sue for actual damages. Pre-infringement registration also entitles the copyright holder to sue for punitive damages.

From: https://glarts.org/font-and-typeface-legal-tip-sheet/

> In the United States, fonts are protectable under copyright law. Typefaces, however, are not. ... A trademark protects what a typeface is called, a copyright protects how a font program is written, and a design patent protects letter design—how the letters appear.

So if I understand this correctly, then unless they have a design patent for the entire range of typefaces, you could use some of the typefaces if you use a different encoding. Perhaps someone with legal background can comment.

That's ridiculous..

That's a standard practice for a lot of webfont vendors isn't it? I know it was for Typekit/Adobe Fonts (which requires a Creative Cloud subscription).

What even is Typekit’s pricing these days? I looked into it a few weeks ago and the only thing I could find was Typekit comes with any Creative Cloud subscription, including $10/mo ones. But surely you can’t pay $10/mo to serve an arbitrary amount from their webfont CDN? Did I miss something? Is the pricing only available after you subscribe?

As far as I know, that is the deal.

I have Typekit via Creative Cloud, use web fonts on my site, and have not run into any additional fees or restrictions. That said, my site is pretty low-traffic, so it's possible there's some issue I'd run into if I used it more.

Since the 2018 rebranding to Adobe Fonts, there are no pageview or font limits for subscribers: https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/plan-limits.html

Agency clients need their own subscription, legally: https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html#web-...

There are no limits on pageviews https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/plan-limits.html

And it's actually cheaper... for $4.99/month you get an InCopy subscription which includes Adobe Fonts. That's the same price as Typekit was before Adobe bought it.

I'm sure it is standard practice. That still doesn't make commercial web font licenses more reasonable for anything except advertising and marketing campaigns.

It's also incredibly risky for advertising and marketing campaigns.

I had one client that started getting their product catalog scraped aggressively, and the invoice for their licensed font usage that month was an order of magnitude higher than they expected (low six figures, vs. low five figures).

They slapped the site behind an aggressively configured enterprise WAF[1] in response to that bill specifically. It made for an abrasive visitor experience, fundamentally broke server logging data (due to header mangling), and constantly broke third party integrations.

It was such a pain to service the client that I ended up convincing their network security team to let me pilot Cloudflare in front of the WAF (that they insisted remain). Ended up using a Worker function to tidy up after the janky WAF header mangling, got them to remove the explicit challenge page, and just swapped out the licensed font for a generic/free one for suspicious activity.

All because of that stupid pageview based font licensing model and its susceptibility to abuse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_application_firewall

If one is going through those lengths to influence a page view counter, couldn’t one just report a different number?

What did the WAF even do?

In the case of the font foundry my client was licensing from,

‣ You were not allowed to self-host the font files, and had to load them directly from the hosting URL provided by the font foundry

‣ There was no explicit reporting involved. Every time the font resource was downloaded from their server, the foundry counted that as a licensed pageview.

‣ The foundry used cache control headers[1] on the response, so that every page load required contacting their origin server and could be logged for billing purposes.

‣ The foundry sent an invoice, telling you what your usage was. If your resource download/pageview count was within your contractual limit, you're invoiced your base rate. If your pageview count was above your contractual rate, you pay your base rate + whatever your overage cost was.

The WAF did a bunch of stuff, but the primary headache was that they enabled challenge pages[2] for every single visitor as a knee-jerk reaction, with a ridiculously low validity timeframe. So every user got hit with an interstitial Javascript challenge page on first pageload, and if they stuck around for just a bit they'd get hit with another one out of nowhere. And that "other one" could easily be on a background resource load rather than the primary page itself, which would just hang. And the way the interstitial page loaded the final content for traffic that "passed the test" obliterated referral information and made it impossible to make heads or tails of your traffic data.

The intent being that automated traffic wouldn't get past the WAF and would never load the actual destination page, and by extension the precious font files. But the way it operated had a lot of nasty side effects that caused a never-ending stream of technical problems, in addition to just being a terrible user experience.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...

[2] https://www.imperva.com/blog/how-incapsula-client-classifica...

It's bullshit like this that cause people to get a local copy of the font, trace it, then release their new font as something with a different name and maybe a few minor changes that normal humans would never notice. Fonts are my least favorite thing, followed closely by printing.

...and all this pain, expense, complexity, and degraded UX, for the sake of _someone's preconceived ideas about the RELATIVE value to the brand of that particular font vs a generic font_. Yikes.

I assume the parent comment meant non-Webfont applications, i.e. for static assets (print or raster/vector digital)

>I had one client that started getting their product catalog scraped aggressively, and the invoice for their licensed font usage that month was an order of magnitude higher than they expected (low six figures, vs. low five figures).

so, my corporate dirty tricks campaign company could offer to make your competitors advertising costs go through the roof if I find they've been using the wrong fonts?!?

> Ended up using a Worker function to tidy up after the janky WAF header mangling, got them to remove the explicit challenge page, and just swapped out the licensed font for a generic/free one for suspicious activity.

So if companies experience expensive font download attacks I can send them a reasonably priced offer for consulting services to fix this problem!?!

'but what about ethics'

grrrr, I hate that good angel.

So I need to develop a view counter for my static website? Not sure how to do that. Why do I need to pay for search engines crawling my website?

I think you link the webfont as an external resource on their site. I'm just speculating, however.

This is exactly how it works. You can't host the fonts locally.

Shouldn’t bother using custom fonts on web pages anyway, use the standard web fonts and save custom fonts for print or graphic designs.

I'm sure you're a big hit at all of the design meetings! How dare the devs tell the marketing/graphics people what they can and cannot do. Becareful, or they'll shove GA/AMP down at you in response!

Fonts adversely affect page load speeds for no good reason, most users don’t even notice or care about these custom fonts. It’s far better for the bottom line to have a fast page.

So they can bitch all they want, but at the end of the day, code is king. So bend the knee.

> So they can bitch all they want, but at the end of the day, code is king. So bend the knee.

lol what...

- External fonts are blocked by security-conscious users (including every Tor Browser user who remembers to set the browser security level correctly) for a reason: they're a major attack vector

- External fonts are often purely cosmetic. Using what over time adds up to several megabytes of data for cosmetics is inconsiderate.

- inb4 "just disable remote fonts if you hate them": doing so breaks many websites that use icon fonts. Expecting users to have to manually configure 50+ websites (yes I did this, I count 54 websites on my exception list) is just insane.

- Many people need to use local fonts. Some dyslexic people actively choose a font that helps them read more easily. Asking someone to play the whack-a-mole game of "will disabling remote fonts break this site's icons or not" game on every site because of a disability just isn't right.

Just use sans, serif, and monospace for content. Let the user agent decide what that looks like, not your company's branding.

to be honest, why have corporate colours or logos either, or use photographs or artwork that causes extra bytes of data to be downloaded for mere cosmetic effect. i think corporate websites should consist of either the english word 'good' or the english word 'bad' based on whether the company is determined to be worthy, say by a committee headed by this dude, with an ASN.1 encoded block of data available for download for any ancilliary information required.

thank you for coming to my TED talk...

It's like talking to a mathmetician. You just can't.

There is a big difference between shipping a 192px PNG/WebP image and shipping a custom font. Most of the criticisms I mentioned don't apply to something as small and safe as a logo.

Small PNGs with good alt text are not as unsafe, large, and brittle as third party fonts.

You're not responding to what I said; you're responding to a caricature of what you imagine me to be like. Doing so derails the discussion.

Cosmetics can be used, but they need a strict performance budget. I'd say that 50kb of render-blocking/CLS-inducing cosmetics and 250kb total cosmetics would be quite generous for 90% of corporate websites, though I'd rather see much lower sizes and reserve more space for content. I would not count inline images that convey information as part of an article's content in this budget.

I'm so glad there are people that are much more creative than you would have the world be, and I'm so glad there is push back on the creatives from just going nuts. However, I never want to live in a world where you're the winning voice in website design. So boring because of some electrons getting annoyed? Good text treatments lend itself to good graphic design. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean the rest of the world should suffer without it. I lived through web1.0, and I'm happy we can finally do things like have different fonts. If we could only get pages to flow just like in Illustrator or InDesign or Quark or whatever, that would be so much better. Instead, we have to live with sticty strict stricts like you fighting to keep things in blocks of boringness.

If you're worried about 3rd party fonts, then force the team to self-host the fonts. If the chosen fonts are not to the end user's liking, they can always override (if they are nerdy enough to know how). Just because lazy devs use 3rd party dosn't mean the baby has to be thrown out with the bath water.

1. Remote fonts, first or third party, are still a massive attack surface. This is why the Tor Browser's Torbutton disables them.

2. Non-default fonts for text still create a suboptimal experience for users with reading impairments like dyslexia who could benefit from using their preferred fonts in place of sans/serif without breaking pages that need icon fonts.

> Just because you don't like it doesn't mean the rest of the world should suffer without it.

By the same token, just because your design/marketing departments think a design "pops" doesn't mean that disadvantaged users should have to suffer by your personal preferences. People who need privacy (e.g tor users who disable js/JIT/SVG/any non-whitelisted fonts), extra a11y (changing default colors, fonts, layouts), and extra bandwidth constraints (satellite internet with high packet loss) exist too, and excessive web design frequently gets these people shafted.

I'm not saying that the world needs to change for my personal preferences; I'm saying that the world needs to cater less to personal preferences and more towards people's needs. People who make up a disadvantaged minority of users need disproportionate levels of accommodation, and their needs are more important than graphic design.

but, you can do both, right? that's what alternative text titles and descriptions of images are for, and the font is used to render test that has already been downloaded as utf-8/ascii/whatever characters making up the content of the html tags in the document. lynx exists. screen readers for the blind exist. that's no reason to try and downgrade the aesthetic experience for everyone else. i mean, i remember usenet and gopher, the web and html are just better, prettier, nicer to look at - a well laid out and designed page of content makes me happy, assuming the content is something i'm interested in, but even that isn't nescessary sometimes. and sure, i'm sad for vision impaired people who can't experience that, and sites that don't provide accessible versions of their content are bad and wrong, of course - but that doesn't mean i need to dilute my own experience to match. it'd be like banning people from going hill-walking because wheelchair users can't participate. the correct response it to try and work out how to include and enable access foir the wheelchair users without destroying the experience for everyone else - put in a cable car or something, i don't know. so yeah, i agree with your sentiments in the last two paragraphs above, i just think there's a better way to solve that problem - upgrade everyone's experience.

I thought best-practice for web apps was to use system fonts ? e.g. along the lines blogged here[1]

[1] https://booking.design/implementing-system-fonts-on-booking-...

CSSWG is trying to standardise ui-serif, ui-sans-serif, ui-monospace and so on. System fonts are a good option if you don't mind sacrificing brand identity for performance. But fonts are not the main causes of latency and lag in most sites these days. The main culprits are tons of ads, tracking scripts and images.

IMHO if you can convince people that you don't need "brand identity" the best font is not choosing a font at all and using the browsers default. (Or maybe "sans-serif" because a lot of browsers have serif defaults which isn't always the best).

I prefer Source Sans Pro.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro

> you can't just buy it and use it, you have to renew the license annually

The page you linked to says otherwise ("License: Pay Once"). In some cases the license is annual.

> include in a web application that will be downloaded and installed by customers

The page you linked to also includes this as a licensing option, no? ("App: for embedding in mobile applications")

I don't see "pay once" as an option anywhere on that page.

I do.

As soon as you click "Buying choices" it defaults to "Desktop" checked with "License: Pay Once" for "1-5 users".

Read the license. "Pay once and don't use it" would be a fair description.

The secret ingredient is copyright infringement

> And my use case isn't even covered: include in a web application that will be downloaded and installed by customers. My current choice is OpenSans https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans

My God if you didn't tee this up perfectly:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090422173924/http://diveintoma...

> FUCK THE FOUNDRIES

> Seriously. Fuck them. They still think they’re in the business of shuffling little bits of metal around. You want to use a super-cool ultra-awesome totally-not-one-of-the-11-web-safe-fonts? Pick an open source font and get on with your life.

> I know what you’re going to say. I can hear it in my head already. It sounds like the voice of the comic book guy from The Simpsons. You’re going to say, “Typography is by professionals, for professionals. Free fonts are worth less than you pay for them. They don’t have good hinting. They don’t come in different weights. They don’t have anything near complete Unicode coverage. They don’t, they don’t, they don’t…”

> And you’re right. You’re absolutely, completely, totally, 100% right. “Your Fonts” are professionally designed, traditionally licensed, aggressively marketed, and bought by professional designers who know a professional typeface when they see it. “Our Fonts” are nothing more than toys, and I’m the guy showing up at the Philadelphia Orchestra auditions with a tin drum and a kazoo. “Ha ha, look at the freetard with his little toy fonts, that he wants to put on his little toy web page, where they can be seen by 2 billion people ha h… wait, what?”

> Let me put it another way. Your Fonts are superior to Our Fonts in every conceivable way, except one:

> WE CAN’T FUCKING USE THEM

Agree.

We have literally got to the point of commisioning fonts so we don't have to worry about licensing (bonus: we will also be able to make them freely available, and hopefully fully open source too).

True but some foundries have had unrestricted licenses (i.e Swiss Foundry) or has recently changed (ABC Dinamo). I completely agree with the webfonts mess though, it’s just so hard to license it as opposed to licensing desktop fonts.

If you want to use Helvetica, you can use the FOSS Nimbus Sans. It's literally a reimplementation of PostScript Helvetica.

https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/urw-base35-fonts

It's still disconcerting to me to see that monotype.com after the Helvetica headline. Monotype and Linotype were fierce rivals since their inception in the late 19th century. The cases where a typeface was offered for both Monotype and Linotype hot metal were rare (Times New Roman and Sabon being the most notable cases). It was only in the post-digital era that we saw consolidation where Agfa (at that time wholly owned by Bayer, the aspirin people) bought the company¹ and merged it with their prepress division, Agfa Compugraphic. It was later sold to a private equity firm who 7 years later bought Linotype, at that time owned by German printing company Heidelberg. They've continued their acquisitions since then purchasing FontShop, the largest indie vendor of typefaces, ITC which was founded as a platform-independent supplier of typeface designs and, most recently URW, a newer entry in the type world but largely influential for high-quality designs (alongside some copied designs) and for the creation of Ikarus which was the first outline-based type description system, predating even Metafont.²

1. The late 20th century Monotype was the descendant of the English spin-off of the American parent company. Lanston Monotype did not survive the transition from hot metal typesetting and was never the significant producer of new designs that English Monotype was. Last I heard, the remains of American Monotype (aka Lanston Monotype) were held by a Canadian printer, although that was 20 years ago and he was not a young man so I don't know now).

2. I had previously thought that Metafont was the first outline-based type design system, not realizing Ikarus's priority until recently.

Ah, so I wasn't imagining it. I know little about font history, but I know that Arial is a Monotype thing, and Arial is a metrically-compatible Helvetica look-alike, so it seemed strange that Helvetica would be under the same brand.

I remember talking to a Monotype executive in the wake of the Microsoft deal that gave us Arial, Book Antiqua, etc. He was embarrassed about having done it, but he said that the deal saved the company from failure. Out of the whole set, Century Gothic is the most interesting face. They reproportioned the Twentieth Century typeface (itself a clone of Futura) to match the metrics of Avant Garde and ended up with something that is neither of its predecessors.

I suspect that the Microsoft Typography group also was created around as a result of shame around the MS-Monotype deal, although I don't know for certain and I've lost touch with the people that I used to know from Microsoft Typography.

Am I crazy for expecting fonts to be free? There are so many good options that I can use without paying a license fee. I can't imagine liking the tiny differences in a font so much that I would get myself locked into a yearly licensing fee.

Yes, you are crazy and perhaps even entitled to think that you deserve the fruit of all font creator’s labour for nothing.

Google Fonts disagrees.

Show me where I can get Pragmata Pro on Google Fonts.

I wouldn't pay an expensive yearly fee for a font, but as software developers like to get paid, graphic designers do as well. Of course you have a lot of graphic designers who do that as a hobby or don't want money and share it freely, but graphic design is a bit different than open source code because the creator doesn't get as much benefits from sharing the work.

> Am I crazy for expecting fonts to be free? There are so many good options that I can use without paying a license fee. I can't imagine liking the tiny differences in a font so much that I would get myself locked into a yearly licensing fee.

Having worked at Microsoft for years, I also got a chance to work directly with Monotype on custom fonts for a project's specific needs (wearable, tiny screen, specific DPI).

Monotype is amazing to work with. And given the amount of work they did, and what we got out of it, the price was absurdly reasonable.

For your blog? Use a free font.

But if you need a custom font, you really do need a custom font, and Monotype is #1 in the industry for a good reason.

I never understood under what circumstances you would really need a custom font. Could you say more about why that was the case?

Likely branding. For example, Coca-cola can write pretty much whatever they want on the can and you'd still know it was them because of the font.

I'm just guessing, but based on the description (Microsoft, wearable, tiny screen, specific DPI) it sounds like for the Microsoft band: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Band

Video Games is an example, each AAAA games I worked on had custom fonts (that was used in-game but also for our powerpoints presentation during the making of the game).

Woah, quadruple A games? Did you work at The Initiative?

A distinctive font can be very recognizable, just like a logo, colour pallet and other parts of a house style.

I've recognized fast food places abroad with the logo text translated into Arabic or Cyrillic by the font.

Microsoft Band, curved screen, tiny DPI, and we initially were using raster fonts, not true type. 4 bit alpha for anti-aliasing.

Primary glyphs were hand hinted, with glyph of each font size custom made to fit on our grid.

For v2 we ended up using Monotype's awesome embedded font engine that let us have real true type font rendering in just kilobytes of RAM with a 96mhz CPU. Insanely cool tech, I believe we were the first adopters of it, we helped them optimize a fair bit of the underlying engine code, and fixed some bugs along the way.

Still a custom font file though. Both the true type and raster fonts were variants of Segoe, Microsoft's main UI font. We wanted it to be on brand, but also look great on our screen.

So tl;dr that is why the MS Band 2 had really good looking CJK glyphs and it is how we pulled off anti-aliased fonts on a tiny LOL CPU with next to no RAM. :)

Both Netflix[0] and the company I worked at designed custom fonts to _save_ money. As other comment threads say, it's a standard practice to license by pageviews, and it can be difficult to negotiate. Alternative: just have your own custom font, exclusive and unlimited license.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/21/17147170/netflix-sans-cus...

...but was it cheaper than just finding a suitable free font(s)?

However, if a design team wants to make their own font and has the resources to do so I don't see why not. It's a strong branding move.

The problem is that for these companies, they're in danger of being burdened by copyright issues, as somehow everyone forgets that designs are copyrightable in Europe, and unlike programmers most designers don't really want legal uncertainties when it comes to their designs (because it's damaging in their circles). If they're designing from scratch, they hold those design copyrights and designers can rest easy knowing that they won't get sued.

It was cheaper than licensing a couple of fonts we liked. So we asked the designer of one of these fonts to tweak their font to our brand, and license as new IP under new name. Because it wasn't entirely "from scratch" the price was reasonable, around $50k.

Why your font choice matters:

https://pimpmytype.com/open-sans/

Paying for products per se is not a problem. What always becomes a problem are stuff like unfair pricing, surge pricing, extortionate rates and fees backed up by monopoly/DRM/regulations, recurring subscriptions or ever increasing rates for the same product with no meaningful improvement and so on.

Fonts can be sold but pricing calculated per page view and device just strikes me as a bit too much. Why not just sell them at a flat rate? Unlike software fonts seldom change once bought so what is the basis for subscription fees instead of one-time sale?

Why are so many formerly desktop applications sold individually per major version now sold as subscription services delivered online through the browser?

The answer is the same.

greed and overreach? lack of alternatives? lock in?

Just the first, money.

I'm not sure the answer is the same.

A subscription provides ongoing revenue to the developer/publisher, but in the case of software, that revenue is (theoretically) being used to fund ongoing development of the product. Whether this is better for users than the traditional paid upgrade model is debatable, but there's undeniably value to the developer in a predictable revenue stream, and as long as the subscription price isn't totally out of whack compared to the old upgrade model I don't mind it. Assuming the developer is keeping up their end of the bargain, so to speak, and making regular releases of the software, then it's perfectly reasonable for you to keep paying for those releases.

But fonts are mostly a different matter. It's vanishingly rare for there to be more than tiny tweaks to a digital release of a typeface after its initial release. Unless I'm paying for someone else to host web fonts for me -- which Helvetica Now's web font license doesn't seem to entail -- this seems to be considerably more usurious. Print magazines weren't charged an annual cost for their typefaces based on their circulation; web fonts should really be no different.

If you don’t like terms don’t pay it. They wouldn’t do it it if it didn’t make money. If the terms are not appealing use a free font.

The price of a Ferrari also seems unreasonable to me. I drive a different car. I also use fonts other than Helvetica. I'm not entitled to either of them.

Fonts are a herculean effort and a dazzling display of creativity and taste. The fee for a good font is, generally speaking, nominal. Use free fonts if you want, but a good font is worth paying for.

You are "crazy"[0] for expecting them to be free. But if you don't want to use a paid font, that's totally within your prerogative.

[0] though I prefer not to use that word, perhaps a better word would be 'entitled'

I'm happy paying people for their effort and creativity. This licensing agreement is not something I would personally consider though:

> You get a total number of prepaid pageviews that can be used over time. This means that you will pre-pay for a number of pageviews, then you’ll have to come back to order more after your site has been viewed that number of times.

> For example, if you order 250,000 page views, when your webpages using the webfonts have been viewed 250,000 times, you will need to buy the webfont package again for an additional number of prepaid pageviews. Pageviews are valid for 4 years.

(Then again I mostly do tools and infra so I'm not in this market anyways.)

Oh, I'm not defending this license in particular. That's a great point, apologies.

Most fonts I see for sale have a one-time license fee for # of views/month. So if you do 500k monthly views you pay ~$99 once, and 5MM views is X*4. That's pretty reasonable to me, the costs are hardly prohibitive.

If you're looking for a fantastic variable font, I can recommend Proxima Vara[0], which is the variable iteration of Proxima Nova. It follows this licensing structure.

[0] https://proxima-vara.marksimonson.com

> [0] though I prefer not to use that word, perhaps a better word would be 'entitled'

Then why not use that word?

I was quoting the OP.

Ah, apologies.

I wonder which is the most fully featured free Helvetica clone?

Check “TeX Gyre Heros”. It is featured version of Nimbus Sans (aka Helvetica digitised by Bitstream) which were donated to X Consortium back then.

TeX Gyre Heros[0] is the most faithful (to the original Helvetica masters) FOSS reproduction that I'm aware of.

[0] https://ctan.org/pkg/tex-gyre-heros?lang=en

Oh man TeX Gyre. That brings me back. Good to know it’s solid!

Fonts are software. They require design and engineering. Are there free, open-source, high quality fonts? Yes, there are. And some businesses choose to sell their fonts. It's their responsibility to make sure discerning users see the justification in that.

Just like software, there are often free alternatives that can suit your fancy... but sometimes, you have to pay for what you really want or need.

Most foundries offer perpetual licenses though, only foundries that offer yearly fee _that I’m aware of_ is Font Bureau and Dalton Maag, compared to maybe hundreds of foundries which offer non-expiring licenses. I agree there is some quirks with license system though.

You’re missing a very important point: Designing fonts always cost money. The thing with Google Fonts (and/or with other free fonts) is the price was paid beforehand by Google (or of course, with hobbyists free time).

Yes, the good ones require a lot of hard work by designers and producers.

Where else can you find a sans-serif battle-tested over a century that's variable, for free?

I don't know about expecting them to be FREE. But sometimes I have to laugh at the licensing terms I see on some fonts.

I have a weird fascination with fonts. They're pleasing to look at, and interesting to compare. But come on. At the end of the day, pretty much 95+% of contemporary fonts are trivial little tweaks to Garamond, Baskerville, Helvetica, Century, or some other font that hasn't been novel for centuries.

What people are paying for are the most subtle of cues, to make their text subconsciously distinguishable from the next magazine or marketing campaign. For a few years, until the new font becomes old-hat or commonplace, and needs to be revamped again to keep your brand subconsciously fresh.

Obviously there is commercial value in this, or else people wouldn't pay the amounts that they pay for fonts. But I don't understand why we lionize font designers the way the we do.

Type design is never finished business. We do new faces, and sometimes just for the sake of novelty.

It is even not needs to be new. Helvetica was designed by Max Miedinger and released by Haas Foundry in 1957. Then it was revised in 1983 as Neue Helvetica. Later, in 2010, it was digitally revived for Bloomberg, with faith on Miedinger’s original designs, and now considered to be best digital design amongst designers (you can even see it’s been mentioned in this thread too). Is it a bad thing that it was revived, even though there were a lot of digital designs(Nimbus Sans and such)? I don’t feel so.

Why do we need new typefaces:

https://klim.co.nz/blog/why-we-need-new-typefaces/

People start to care when they get deeper into the graphic design rabbit hole and basically express their work through type and its character exclusively, like in logo design, poster design etc. where type character has a big impact on the individual letter level.

Body and sub-heading text is a bit more forgiving and less detail thirsty, the focus is more on the texture of textblocks rather than the individual letter or words.

If you have to cut up and modify individual letters, Helvetica can be quite nice to work with.

I expect some fonts to be free, but I do not expect all fonts to be free. The former is because we have become dependent upon fonts through the use of technology, and having restrictive licenses upon all fonts would inhibit the use of technology. The latter is because I have no desire to dictate the terms that font creators use.

That being said, I don't have high expectations or great needs of fonts since legibility is the most important criteria. Fonts are tools to differentiate the structure of a document. In most cases, the design of a document is less relevant.

Well, no, it's realistic. I find myself going to Google Fonts more and more these days, even for serious brand work. This is mostly due to Google and a few other companies sponsoring the making of great open fonts.

However, the free market situation is pretty yikes. A few giants and a bunch of boutique foundries (check out https://klim.co.nz/) still make it work, but the open source monetisation problem that we find in software is a lot worse when it comes to fonts, because there is no sustainable product/service to sell with your free font.

Maybe the age of great font making is coming to a close. After what must be hundreds of thousands of great fonts (and so many people still just opting for Helvetica), maybe we got all we need.

I think there's still some spaces where new fonts thrive: company branding, movies, and television.

Should we reasonably expect the fruit of anyone's labor to be free? It's a designer's right to voluntarily give away their product, but that doesn't mean it's our right to use just anyone's work for free without their permission.

Just use the free ones. There are some that are better than Helvetica, just like there are cars cheaper and faster than a Ferrari without the brand name.

First of all, there are many free fonts but most of them contains a very narrow subset of characters. If you want a complete font with 3000+ Latin+Greek characters and variations like old-style numbers, small-caps, ligatures and so on, that's a massive work behind it. And also, as an individual, of-course it's expensive to pay hundreds of dollars on a complete font-family, but for a company making money on graphic design that's really not a problem.

Do you genuinely notice differences between fonts? I have a general sense of monospaced vs proportional and serif vs sans-serif. Past that it's mostly all the same to me and I'm kind of impressed that people pay so much attention to the tiny details (and maybe questioning whether they really do or whether fonts are kind of like wine tasting).

I don't think "you" as in "the general user base" notices the differences between fonts, but there certainly is some innate sense of fitness to a design. Similar to how people can tell something is cohesive or jankily designed, even if they can't pinpoint what causes the jank.

Personally, I can't recognize specific fonts in the wild (especially Helvetica and its infinite lookalikes), but can certainly feel when a site uses an inappropriate font (usually too thin, but also things like using a UI font for longer-form text), to the extent I have a few userscripts that change some popular site's fonts to something more appropriate in my optinion.

I just released an update to one of my apps that adds a typography library. Like you said font's are a very subtle thing and as I was converting my app I didn't notice that much. But after pushing the update and seeing the two versions (before and after the upgrade) side by side you see that proper typography can help make an app or a website look that much more "professional". The app before didn't look bad, but it had a sheen of "some guy built this in his basement". Now when I look at the app I get a "ok well a cash strapped startup built this"

They do. As fast as I can look at a picture of a cat or a dog and tell you which of those animals it is, when my husband sees a font he immediatly knows which font it is. I find it fascinating. He is also my go to person when I choose fonts because he always give critiques I would never think of.

There is an awesome useful addon if you like hunting down fonts that you came across the sites that uses them. It is called "WhatFont" for Firefox and Chromium browsers. Click the button and then click the font, it will reveal every detail of that font.

Yes! Fonts make a huge difference in the impression a piece of text will make. Just consider that italics and bold have been necessary features of word processors since pretty much the beginning. For an even more subtle example, Twitter's new font is a very plain sans serif, but people are complaining of headaches from reading it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156094

I can only recognize the most common ones: Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman, Calibri, Ubuntu, Comic Sans, Roboto, Computer Modern.

But more than noticing the differences between them, what's important is noticing when there's something wrong in a composition because of the font.

For example, if you show a UI that uses a serif font to someone, they'll notice there's something wrong with it, but most people probably won't tell you exactly what it is.

I absolutely do. I'm not sure why, it's not something I specifically pay attention to, but I definitely appreciate text in some fonts more than others. For example, I really liked The Economist's print font (and I don't mind the redesign [1])

That said, I once spent a couple weeks trying out various programming fonts/sizes, so maybe I'm an outlier. (I'm on Mac now, and the system Monaco font is fine. I don't remember what I had settled on when I was using Linux until 6 years ago)

I have to add that I recently upgraded from a 2k 27" monitor to a 4k one, and the first thing I noticed is how much nicer all the text is (again, macOS)

[1] https://designmodo.com/the-economist-redesign/

That said, programming fonts are a particular niche of interest, because first you want your ambiguous glyphs to be easily distinguishable. O vs 0 vs o, l vs I vs 1 vs i, and secondly you want the overall feel to be pleasing to you.

Other considerations are how does the font render g (is there a loop at the bottom, or just a tail) or a (does it have a "tail" at the top or is more like an o with an extra leg?).

People can get really worked up about these details, just like a coding style guide: if it differs from what you're expecting, it's distracting, but you get used to it after a few days/weeks.

Since last I went on this journey, I see that this wonderful website for comparing programming fonts popped up:

https://www.programmingfonts.org

I don't recognize fonts by name, but I certainly notice differences between fonts all the time. Too thin, too bold, too much space between characters, too italic, more or less impact, how difficult it is for me to read a passage with a given font.

Sometimes more than the content

Web fonts are so weird, to display this site I had to download the advertised font as a .WOFF file to my computer. I now have a fully featured copy of what they are selling.

I know they are actually selling the license to use it but still it seems weird that any site that licenses and uses this will also be mass distributing it to peoples machines.

It's the same concept as Windows. You can (as in physically, not as in "it's allowed") download and use it without a license, and no one will care if it's just you personally, but expect lawyers if you're a big company.

This is a nightmare for those who are indecisive.

Well by gosh, I am old enough to remember Adobe Multiple Masters…

https://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/30/the-adobe-originals-silv...

…a technology which went absolutely nowhere.

Makes me glad to see Helvetica is now available as variable, as well as a non-trivial number of open-source fonts.

https://fonts.google.com/?vfonly=true&sort=popularity

(Still waiting for Roboto, though. Slab and mono are there, the main sans isn’t yet, which is too bad.)

I bought a license for Myriad Pro MM for 400 Deutsche Mark before it was cool :D

Helvetica just gives me warm feelings. For the other type freaks lost around here: https://www.hustwit.com/helvetica/

The fact that it’s nearly 70 years old and is still an influential “modern” font is amazing to me. It just feels right.

I feel the same for Futura, which apparently was created in 1927. The longevity is just crazy. “Hip” brands and designers still use it today just like Helvetica. And I can easily see these fonts still being used in the far future. I wonder if there are any other sans serif typefaces like these.

Dragging the "optical size" slider to a lower value, I'm horrified to see that the cutoff on the lowercase 'e' is no longer parallel to the direction of the text. This was always my go-to way of differentiating Helvetica from look alikes. Now I have to find a new technique :(

Helvetica Now is such a departure from what makes the typeface a classic that I think Monotype kept Helvetica in the name mostly for marketing purposes. To me CommercialType’s Neue Haas Grotesk is the absolute best digitalization of Miedingers original drawings.

Can you elaborate?

I'm comparing the two e.g. on MyFonts:

https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/helvetica-now/

https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/neue-haas-grotesk/

Or specifically for the medium text:

https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/helvetica-now/text-medium/

https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/neue-haas-grotesk/pro...

Aside from the fact that they're scaled slightly differently, nothing whatsoever jumps out to me as noticeably different, in any weight, except that Neue Haas Grotesk has descenders that seem unnaturally short, but I can't tell if that might be a rendering box clipping issue.

What makes Helvetica Now "such a departure" and the name Helvetica just "marketing"? Whatever difference there is seems extremely subtle to my eyes...

They are very different fonts.

I have used them both in apps, and they both have their quirks. I excepted Helvetica Now to be slightly better/modernized version of traditional helvetica, but it is not. It feels different (not better).

Nue Hass Grotesk has its own issues. It has a very industrial feel, and make it great for single line of text as a display font. It fails if your text is over 2-3 lines (eg. news headlines). I think Bloomberg news uses it successfully, as it matches its 'industrial/business' feel, but it is not a 'warm' font.

The lesson I learned: The perfect font doesn't exist. They all have flaws.

Again, just... not seeing it? Can you point to any actual visual difference, something objectively measurable, as opposed to subjectively "different" or "better"?

I'm feeling like I'm in crazytown, you're saying they're "very different" and the letterforms just look... virtually identical to me. Totally same personality and all.

I'd wonder if I needed higher resolution, but you're talking about using them in apps, so that's definitely not the case.

There are differences between all the different remakes of Helvetica. Neue Haas Grotesk just happens to be one of the good ones, and even better, you can get it for free from Microsoft for your own use, it's part of one of the downloadable font packs from them.

I would add to that though, where something is being displayed matters too. If you're displaying on screen and you're not using anti-aliasing (I don't) then whoever did a better job hinting will display better on the screen.

I did some investigation because I was curious as well.

I think one distinction is in the lowercase 'm'. Primarily around the left most stroke of the letter where the first arch of the 'm' meets. Neue Haas Grotesk's 'm' has a narrower starting stroke on the arch when it's leaving the first stroke. Whereas Helvetica has a mostly even width arch on the 'm'. This one I'm relatively uncertain on and it could be my monitor but it does seem like there's a mild difference in whatever that nook/cranny is called.

Another spot where I think the differences are apparent are with the lowercase 't'. Helvetica has an almost right angle change in direction on the inside of the base of the 't' whereas Neue Haas is smoother.

I would also look at the lowercase 'a' for differences if you really wanted to see it, Neue's is much curvier on the "belly" of the a.

Sorry if these aren't the right words, not entirely sure what to call the "parts" of a character in a font.

The difference in shape between specific characters is one thing, though it's just as important to took at the typeface in use in body text, at different sizes, different line length, and so on. The fact that people here compare typography to winetasting instead of acknowledging the fact that it's a serious and intricate skill is honestly baffling and rude. Anyway, take a look at the "gestalt" example here, where you can see how Helvetica is much wider, has bigger spacing between characters and looks almost square in comparison to Neue Haas Grotesk. The rest of the article is very interesting as well: http://www.christianschwartz.com/haasgrotesk.shtml

If you're interested in variable fonts, the recent SF Design Week talk [1] from the folks at Google was pretty accessible! Maybe if enough folks ping them they'd be willing to put up a recording.

[1] https://sfdesignweek.org/events/typography-in-the-variable-a...

Looks like replays and on-demand are available for $15 [1]. What were your favorite presentations from SF Design Week? I did not attend but I would purchase on-demand for $15 if there were a few interesting talks.

[1] https://www.boomset.com/apps/eventpage/113863

I didn't realize it's all still accessible! The event list [1] includes abstracts. For me, personally, I was more interested in the conversations (e.g., [2]) than the various software companies talking about design.

I'd say if you're interested, treat it as a $15 "watch a few talks instead of going to a movie".

[1] https://sfdesignweek.org/category/?s&events

[2] https://sfdesignweek.org/events/cocktails-with-top-designers...

The extreme values for "Optical Size" really alter the character of the font for me. Changing the angle of the lower arc of the "e" for example really alter how the font feels, and it's unrecognisable to me as Helvetica:

https://imgur.com/a/vtQZc9I

Huh, I'd assumed that ink traps would somehow be absent from fonts intended for screen use. Thinking about it now, though, it does make sense that (at least on typical computers) it's the same font file used on-screen as sent to the printer, and at small sizes on-screen they're probably hidden by hinting anyway. A cursory search also reveals that varying paper and ink conditions made for an age-old problem of achieving consistent weight.

And indeed, the distinctive spur of the 'R' all but disappears at low optical size. Something else I never noticed: the spur of the 'a' changes from vertical to horizontal at high weights in many grotesques.

Can someone explain why pro fonts are so damn expensive?

There are a bazillion free fonts which are great for most uses, but for a font like this where it's not as if the font was custom calligraphy (e.g. for a video game or something) and is just a "good normal font", what exactly goes on to make this font and others like it worth the money?

I genuinely don't know if there are special features of this font that are beyond what you can get from very similar free fonts or if it's just some brand recognition thing.

Brand is definitely a strong driver. The number of styles, and the number of glyphs is also an aspect. Being worth the money is compared not just the font itself, but to what you expect in return. If you're thinking about how popular your mobile OS got, it could make sense to design a distinct font for it.

Really great font. I loved Helvetica, Helvetica Now was a great extension, but was just so many files, and this is a great fix to the problem. I would have liked slant to be yet another variable instead of just two variations, but this is still nice.

And yet, I just can't imagine ever using this in actual design. Licensing makes it ridiculous to recommend to almost all clients, and there are great, much more affordable alternatives, Inter being completely free.

Nice!

However, I prefer IBM Plex[1], and it has the advantage of being an open-source project!

I have recently re-designed my CV (15 pages down to 2) and used IBM Plex for all of it... happy so far.

[1] https://github.com/IBM/plex

First impression: wow, they aced the execution on this advertising. Just the right level of cheeky.

2nd impression: Did they intentionally put the white monotype logo on a mainly white animated header so it kind of disfigures the font shown therein? Surely that can’t be a mistake!

I like new spins on old classics. Always liked Hellvetica: https://allbestfonts.com/hellvetica/

It would be even funnier if there were just slight keming irregularities, just enough to infuriate those who care about such things (oblicatory xkcd: [1])

[1] https://xkcd.com/1015/

/r/keming is still the best named subreddit on the whole site.

Just yesterday, I hat a Renault Koleos in front of me and was wondering why the name looked so weird and I have the feeling that the kerning is just slightly off (e.g. the first O is too close to the K):

https://www.netcarshow.com/Renault-Koleos-2020-1600-0b.jpg

I hope Knuth is smiling that Metafont-style procedural fonts are winning in the end after decades of haters :D.

Variable fonts aren't "Metafont-style procedural fonts"

Tell me more?

That was a very cool website. I didn't know that fonts alone could be used to advertise itself.

"Helvetica® Now Variable builds on the groundbreaking work of 2019’s Helvetica Now release."

I am so far out of touch that I cannot believe this is relevant to anyone outside of designers who build their career on constantly changing to the newest thing?

really amazing work by the monotype team. As always, font licensing is a very tricky business, so I understand everyone's frustration here.

If any of you are looking for an open-sourced sans serifs for your sass and other projects, I covered a couple in my newsletter. I go over how to use them with examples and use cases. some are variable:

https://fonts.substack.com/p/dosis https://fonts.substack.com/p/fow-no4-libre-franklin-a-versat...

So what happened to the hacker news page and the new font (is it something wrong with my browser, but things look a bit different last few days)

The only changes in the CSS this year are around word-wrapping. If it looks different, something’s changed on your machine

Only a psychopath puts font altering controls after the text it alters. Nearly unusable on mobile in paragraph mode because it's moving all over the place.

Nice font but, as ever, shame about the licensing.

Part of the "never own anything" "infinite rent seeking" license mindset. They are dirtbags. Pass.

people pay for fonts? I just figured everyone downloaded them off of dafont.com and was done with it...

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