Gill Sans and Zapf's Optima were the first big humanist fonts, but they are really best used sparsely. Zapf died earlier this year, by the way. But with Adrian Frutiger's Frutiger the whole world was blown open. Helvetica had a predecessor fairly like it in Akzidenz Grotesk, but Frutiger was something else entirely. Grotesques had been around for decades prior to Helvetica. Frutiger was a revolution. I and everybody…
(In the first line, I forgot about the less ubiquitous Johnston as a slow cooking predecessor to Gill Sans, sorry)
It's interesting to compare typefaces of road signs across Europe. Frutiger is pretty nice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_(typeface) I like (am used to?) the Italian one too: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfabeto_Normale (derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_(typeface) ) I don't much care for the Austrian/German ones though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_1451 - apparently it was designed…
Hey, don't hate on DIN :) For a font designed in 1931, it's impressively timeless. It doesn't seem to communicate any particular era or emotion, so it suits almost anything especially in digital form. Both Google's Roboto and Apple's new San Francisco display fonts seem heavily inspired by DIN (just IMHO of course).
DIN is timeless! I think that it is beatiful font, with its cold appeal (it's the coldest font I think). I think Conduit also have this feeling a bit...
It's interesting to compare typefaces of road signs across Europe. Frutiger is pretty nice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_(typeface) I like (am used to?) the Italian one too: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfabeto_Normale (derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_(typeface) ) I don't much care for the Austrian/German ones though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_1451 - apparently it was designed…
It's interesting to compare typefaces of road signs across Europe. Frutiger is pretty nice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_(typeface) I like (am used to?) the Italian one too: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfabeto_Normale (derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_(typeface) ) I don't much care for the Austrian/German ones though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_1451 - apparently it was designed…
Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tratex
Is the sample from wikipedia indicative of the typical kerning for Tratex? If so, that'd be unfortunate...
> treat me as a second-class citizen I think you're being a little excessively hyperbolic. They don't support your browser yet and state as much - that's hardly malicious or demeaning to you. They also promise support is coming soon. It's a very early phase product that uses a lot of newer and less universal APIs. It's not that they have so many users that they don't care - rather, it's that they're still beta testin…
You only get one chance to make a first impression, etc. I have a similar antipathy for Quora for requiring facebook logins to view their content (not actually theirs, their users' content) that came up during search results. I believe they've now dropped the facebook login requirement, and I think they now show a lot of content from organic search traffic, but I plan on ignoring them anyway for as long as possible.
Oh, I don't disagree that the specific method followed by this site is garbage. I just felt that the comment I was replying to was overanalyzing the motives behind a relatively innocuous (if poorly thought out) piece of content.
Gill Sans and Zapf's Optima were the first big humanist fonts, but they are really best used sparsely. Zapf died earlier this year, by the way. But with Adrian Frutiger's Frutiger the whole world was blown open. Helvetica had a predecessor fairly like it in Akzidenz Grotesk, but Frutiger was something else entirely. Grotesques had been around for decades prior to Helvetica. Frutiger was a revolution. I and everybody…
> Zapf died earlier this year, by the way. Somehow, I missed that news. Damn, the world of typography lost two of its biggest visionaries this summer alone. I always preferred Zapf's fonts to Frutiger's by a wide margin (I always favor serif fonts over sans serifs), but they were both brilliant men, and typography won't be the same without either.
Zapf has made some excellent sans serifs. Optima is likely the one you've seen the most, but there's URW Grotesk, too.
