Most typeface designs are the result of fashion or changes in taste some are technologically driven. (Image: Library of Congress)įor Helvetica, an explanation of its history helps to explain its longevity. But how do you evaluate a typeface? Is it just based on its widespread use? Or its suitability to the subject at hand? Ease of reading? Familiarity?īust portrait of Muhammad Ali by Ira Rosenberg, from the World Journal Tribune. When it comes to, say, boxers, you can handicap the various athletes in the ring and predict that Muhammad Ali would beat Jack Johnson or Jim Corbett and that, therefore, he is number one, but a lot of other factors come to bear on your decision: sentimentality, the fact that Ali is acknowledged (by people like me, with no real knowledge of the sport) to be “The Greatest” he has name recognition, and so on. HELVETICA VS HELVETICA NEUE HOW TOHow To Choose The Right Face For A Beautiful Body. HELVETICA VS HELVETICA NEUE PROFESSIONAL80 Beautiful Typefaces For Professional Design.Lessons From Swiss Style Graphic Design.I dismissed the list because it was based on marketing figures from one source, FontShop, coupled with the opinions of half a dozen mostly Berlin-based typographers, but I was still incensed. The other day someone sent me a link to a website with the preposterous title of “ The 100 Best Typefaces of All Time”. Topping the chart was Helvetica, and that stirred my ire. Make sure to check the corrections before reading this article.-Ed. We republished Indra’s article to correct the factual errors, with her permission of course. Update: Hours after the publication of this article Indra Kupferschmid published an article in which she corrected some of the facts presented in the original article and provided an opposite view on the issue. I dismissed the list because it was based on marketing figures from one source, FontShop, coupled with the opinions of half a dozen Berlin-based typographers, but I was still incensed. Topping the chart was Helvetica, and that stirred my ire. It's just not interesting.The other day someone sent me a link to a website with the preposterous title of “ The 100 Best Typefaces of All Time”. That you insist on making some kind of platform flame out of this is beyond me. the Droid Sans fonts earlier, or the Bitstream Vera family in desktop linux) to do their clone, and likewise plugged it needlessly. Google hired a font designer (for reasons that likely have to do with the ability to open source the result, c.f. Apple chose the former and plugged it needlessly via marketing. So Helvetica Neue and Roboto are new entries in the family. You're probably aware of Arial, but there's also Nimbus Sans, Swiss, Triumvirate (yes, I used Google to look those up, but I'm pretty sure the list gets into the dozens). Helvetica happens to be one successful font, and it's spawned a huge number of clones. Typeface vendors have been cloning and selling each other's work since long before fonts were something rasterized on a computer. That's a troll's term don't be surprised if you get into flames when you use it.īut the core issue here is that you don't understand the typography industry. Perhaps it's because of the use of the loaded term "ripoff".
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