The story behind the Heliotrope Font (2021)

mbtype.com

56 points·Caiero··8 comments

I certainly have an appreciation for a well crafted font.

As a programmer I am super picky and opinionated about the font I use for coding. I can have a very visceral reaction to one font over another. (For instance, I require really good clarity between O/0, and I/l/1, and I really really hate ligatures.)

That being said, I have very little knowledge about what goes into actually crafting a font. Whenever I read an article like this that goes into how the sausage is made I find it very fascinating.

I wish more fonts were presented alongside expansive, illustrated backstories about their designs (including more of Butterick’s fonts). Of course it’s not uncommon for material like this to exist, but it’s often only found in interviews or third-party blogs. Sometimes it gets a paragraph in a PDF sample.

You may enjoy the Klim Type Foundry Blog (especially the "design information" posts):

https://klim.co.nz/blog/

Heliotrope ... with small purple blooms and allegedly [1] the scent of cherry pie

Footnote[ 1] Can emit a delicious vanilla fragrance or no fragrance at all depending on the variety. The fragrance is well carried by the air

Ever blooming sub-shrub from arid places of Peru. Bee and newbie friendly. Very rewarding if cultured correctly in a big pot

that paragraph about optima is so strange

I agree. Optima is a humanist sans-serif but he doesn't seem to know that terminology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Humanist_sans-serif_t...

He uses the term in his non-typographer-oriented book about typography, so that would be a little surprising: https://practicaltypography.com/verdana-alternatives.html

That isn’t the appropriate term for this post, though: most humanist sans-serifs don’t have the flared ends which he highlights for Optima.

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