No-one ever got fired for using Helvetica Neue Light? Maybe they should when it gets used like this. Then you have Helvetica Neue Light as further tightened in the TiVo user interface, further smudged by my television. Below that is Helvetica Neue Light, a slightly worse choice with its tighter letter spacing. I turned on my television yesterday and saw this:Īt the top of the preceding image you can see plain old Helvetica Light with its slightly more compact letter forms (look at the B and the o in particular) and more generous letter spacing. But this doesn’t mean that the incumbent Lucida Grande doesn’t remain a better choice from a practical perspective. Helvetica is still far from ideal as a UI font, but Apple’s in-built Dynamic Type helps by doing things like tweaking the letter spacing for differently sized text, and on a Retina display it may work fine. Consequently the Regular weight is now the default, as it will be in the forthcoming desktop UI. The preview of iOS7 used Helvetica Neue Light and Ultra Light, which was received very badly. Since iOS 7 and soon in OS Yosemite, Apple has been using Helvetica Neue for its user interfaces. Here’s where my ire is really provoked: Helvetica Neue Light as an interface font. Try setting CLINT EASTWOOD in Helvetica Neue Light and see what happens to the great man’s first name. I mean really tight, such that on regular screens the letters bump into each other. It also uses a lot less resources compared to the current fonts.The thing with Helvetica Neue is that, as well as being a boxier, more uniform digital redrawing of the original Helvetica metal font, the in-built letter spacing is really tight. Such high flexible ability helps the characters to adjust to fit varying sizes and proportions of display screens, from large to small, high definition to low definition. No matter whether they are used on print media or display screens, especially nowadays when there’s an incredible variety of gadgets and display technologies. Suppakit Chalermlarp: The variable font technology enables designers to have more fun using all these different characters because it grants everyone endless possibilities. This was before it was later developed into the One variable font file technology, which includes every width and weight within the font’s variation axis. The conversation grants us a better understanding in grasping the variable font, which was born from the mutual agreement between big tech companies including Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and Google in 2016. This is a part of Suppakit’s insights and opinions about the typeface. Recently after the launch of Helvetica Now Variable, we had a chance to talk with Suppakit Chalermlarp, the co-founder of Katatrad, a type design studio and Thailand’s leading digital type foundry. Particularly at a size smaller than 6 points, such as the small display screens of smart watches or smartphones. But the most crucial reason behind their decision to readjust the font that had been heavily used by almost every sector was due to the fact that Helvetica becomes difficult to read when used in smaller spaces. When digitalised, these alternatives were not included, hence the Monotype team’s attempt to bring them back. Even the punctuation had different variations, from sharp to round edges.
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For instance, the ‘R’ with had a straight leg whereas the ‘a’ was actually the letter ‘d’ with no leg, and the clean ‘U’ was found without any additional projection. They discovered that in the first thirty years, some of the Latin letters of the Helvetica typeface had more than one variable to use. They looked up and found the design process, the hot lead typesetting technique, as well as the transportation of the type metals to different countries including various ways about how the font had been used. They researched the information and traced back the font’s first version designed by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann back in 1957.
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Back in 2015, Monotype’s team of font designers at the studio’s Germany office were developing an idea for a new version of Helvetica. Before we dive deeper into the story of Helvetica Now Variable, let’s go back and talk about Helvetica Now.