It seems blatantly wrong to me that anything other than traditional or old style typography would use lower case numbers.
Who are these people designing typefaces in the neo-grotesk family with old style numerics?
Who are these people designing typefaces in the neo-grotesk family with old style numerics?
In contrast, you use standard numerals for mathematics, spreadsheets, next to uppercase letters, etc. Anywhere where the context is numerical or technical or calling attention.
There's nothing "blatantly wrong" about it. Ultimately it's a stylistic choice (most people don't bother, same as most people don't bother with small caps), but it's a really nice one. I think it's cool to see it in neo-grotesque personally.
There's nothing inherent to the aesthetic principles of sans-serif that precludes them. From my understanding, the historical reason why they weren't used in the mid 1900's was for technical reasons with phototypesetting, needing to limit the character set. Now that it's all digital and Unicode we're able to repopularize them.
There's "nothing inherent to the aesthetic principles" of rotary phones, but you don't use a smart phone with a rotary phone interface do you?
Taste is formed with the times in which they are developed in. And there are those who have taste coherence and those who do not.
"Nothing inherent to the aesthetic principles" of emo hair fringe or disco attire, but you wouldn't wear either to a historical reenactment of the American Civil War, either.
When people use Humanist typography they are invoking a specific feel.
But you know what, there are plenty of out of place things that can still just be appealing sometimes. /shrug
[0] https://github.com/system-fonts/modern-font-stacks#neo-grote...
There aren't that many descenders in lowercase English, but in a script like Shavian where there are many, the old style figures feel really "at home".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-height
[1] https://github.com/system-fonts/modern-font-stacks#classical...
None of the fonts here have lowercase figures by default on Mac.
(If Neo-Grotesque is showing lowercase figures on your machine, I think something funky is going on with your font stack-- pretty sure none of those fonts should have them by default.)