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Helvetica Now Variable

monotype.com

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Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#121

Post by cosmie »

da_chicken wrote: post #104
stimpson_j_cat wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a standard practice for a lot of webfont vendors isn't it? I know it was for Typekit/Adobe Fonts (which requires a Creative Cloud subscription).

I'm sure it is standard practice. That still doesn't make commercial web font licenses more reasonable for anything except advertising and marketing campaigns.

It's also incredibly risky for advertising and marketing campaigns.

I had one client that started getting their product catalog scraped aggressively, and the invoice for their licensed font usage that month was an order of magnitude higher than they expected (low six figures, vs. low five figures).

They slapped the site behind an aggressively configured enterprise WAF[1] in response to that bill specifically. It made for an abrasive visitor experience, fundamentally broke server logging data (due to header mangling), and constantly broke third party integrations.

It was such a pain to service the client that I ended up convincing their network security team to let me pilot Cloudflare in front of the WAF (that they insisted remain). Ended up using a Worker function to tidy up after the janky WAF header mangling, got them to remove the explicit challenge page, and just swapped out the licensed font for a generic/free one for suspicious activity.

All because of that stupid pageview based font licensing model and its susceptibility to abuse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_application_firewall

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#122

Post by arendtio »

Sharlin wrote: post #6
legrande wrote: post #4

I like new spins on old classics. Always liked Hellvetica: https://allbestfonts.com/hellvetica/

It would be even funnier if there were just slight keming irregularities, just enough to infuriate those who care about such things (oblicatory xkcd: [1]) [1] https://xkcd.com/1015/

Just yesterday, I hat a Renault Koleos in front of me and was wondering why the name looked so weird and I have the feeling that the kerning is just slightly off (e.g. the first O is too close to the K):

https://www.netcarshow.com/Renault-Koleos-2020-1600-0b.jpg

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#123

Post by chipotle_coyote »

mikedc wrote: post #96
tomrod wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point stands. These ought to not be royalty driven.

I'm not sure I follow. Whether or not the typeface is eligible for copyright, the pricing model and terms of use are at the discretion of the font creator.

"How a font is sold is up to the discretion of the font creator" and "a font should not be sold on a sliding cost scale" aren't mutually exclusive -- the latter's pretty clearly asserting an opinion about reasonable pricing models and terms of use. There are a lot of things people do that they're perfectly within their rights to do that someone else might strongly believe they shouldn't, right?

Personally, I don't like the idea of selling fonts with costs governed by web page impressions, either, no matter how common it may be in the industry. I genuinely like having what I consider to be nice typefaces for my web sites, but this kind of licensing makes it incredibly impractical for me to use most commercial options.

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#124

Post by spockz »

cosmie wrote: post #121
da_chicken wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure it is standard practice. That still doesn't make commercial web font licenses more reasonable for anything except advertising and marketing campaigns.

It's also incredibly risky for advertising and marketing campaigns. I had one client that started getting their product catalog scraped aggressively, and the invoice for their licensed font usage that month was an order of magnitude higher than they expected (low six figures, vs. low five figures). They slapped the site behind an aggressively configured enterprise WAF[1] in response to that bill specifically. It made…

If one is going through those lengths to influence a page view counter, couldn’t one just report a different number?

What did the WAF even do?

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#125

Post by hda111 »

da_chicken wrote: post #14
flowerlad wrote: post #9

Fantastic font, now infinitely malleable! Unfortunately it is expensive, and you can't just buy it and use it, you have to renew the license annually. https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/helvetica-now-variable?tab... And my use case isn't even covered: include in a web application that will be downloaded and installed by customers. My current choice is OpenSans https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans

> Unfortunately it is expensive, and you can't just buy it and use it, you have to renew the license annually. Not even that. If you want it for a web page you have to pay in blocks of page views. In my mind that moves it from "eh" to "LOL no". These are licensing terms for people who want the name.

So I need to develop a view counter for my static website? Not sure how to do that. Why do I need to pay for search engines crawling my website?

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#126

Post by ardit33 »

crazygringo wrote: post #61
seumars wrote: post #17

Helvetica Now is such a departure from what makes the typeface a classic that I think Monotype kept Helvetica in the name mostly for marketing purposes. To me CommercialType’s Neue Haas Grotesk is the absolute best digitalization of Miedingers original drawings.

Can you elaborate? I'm comparing the two e.g. on MyFonts: https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/helvetica-now/ https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/neue-haas-grotesk/ Or specifically for the medium text: https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/helvetica-now/text-medium/ https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/neue-haas-grotesk/pro... Aside from the fact that they're scaled slightly differently, nothing whatsoever jumps out to…

They are very different fonts.

I have used them both in apps, and they both have their quirks. I excepted Helvetica Now to be slightly better/modernized version of traditional helvetica, but it is not. It feels different (not better).

Nue Hass Grotesk has its own issues. It has a very industrial feel, and make it great for single line of text as a display font. It fails if your text is over 2-3 lines (eg. news headlines). I think Bloomberg news uses it successfully, as it matches its 'industrial/business' feel, but it is not a 'warm' font.

The lesson I learned: The perfect font doesn't exist. They all have flaws.

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#127

Post by com2kid »

philosopher1234 wrote: post #40
com2kid wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I crazy for expecting fonts to be free? There are so many good options that I can use without paying a license fee. I can't imagine liking the tiny differences in a font so much that I would get myself locked into a yearly licensing fee. Having worked at Microsoft for years, I also got a chance to work directly with Monotype on custom fonts for a project's specific needs (wearable, tiny screen, specific DPI). Mo…

I never understood under what circumstances you would really need a custom font. Could you say more about why that was the case?

Microsoft Band, curved screen, tiny DPI, and we initially were using raster fonts, not true type. 4 bit alpha for anti-aliasing.

Primary glyphs were hand hinted, with glyph of each font size custom made to fit on our grid.

For v2 we ended up using Monotype's awesome embedded font engine that let us have real true type font rendering in just kilobytes of RAM with a 96mhz CPU. Insanely cool tech, I believe we were the first adopters of it, we helped them optimize a fair bit of the underlying engine code, and fixed some bugs along the way.

Still a custom font file though. Both the true type and raster fonts were variants of Segoe, Microsoft's main UI font. We wanted it to be on brand, but also look great on our screen.

So tl;dr that is why the MS Band 2 had really good looking CJK glyphs and it is how we pulled off anti-aliased fonts on a tiny LOL CPU with next to no RAM. :)

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#128

Post by mikedc »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #123
mikedc wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I follow. Whether or not the typeface is eligible for copyright, the pricing model and terms of use are at the discretion of the font creator.

"How a font is sold is up to the discretion of the font creator" and "a font should not be sold on a sliding cost scale" aren't mutually exclusive -- the latter's pretty clearly asserting an opinion about reasonable pricing models and terms of use. There are a lot of things people do that they're perfectly within their rights to do that someone else might strongly believe they shouldn't, right? Personally, I don't li…

Of course, but the "point" in question is whether a typeface (or font) should be copyrightable.

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#129

Post by xwdv »

da_chicken wrote: post #14
flowerlad wrote: post #9

Fantastic font, now infinitely malleable! Unfortunately it is expensive, and you can't just buy it and use it, you have to renew the license annually. https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/helvetica-now-variable?tab... And my use case isn't even covered: include in a web application that will be downloaded and installed by customers. My current choice is OpenSans https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans

> Unfortunately it is expensive, and you can't just buy it and use it, you have to renew the license annually. Not even that. If you want it for a web page you have to pay in blocks of page views. In my mind that moves it from "eh" to "LOL no". These are licensing terms for people who want the name.

Shouldn’t bother using custom fonts on web pages anyway, use the standard web fonts and save custom fonts for print or graphic designs.

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#130

Post by flixic »

philosopher1234 wrote: post #40
com2kid wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I crazy for expecting fonts to be free? There are so many good options that I can use without paying a license fee. I can't imagine liking the tiny differences in a font so much that I would get myself locked into a yearly licensing fee. Having worked at Microsoft for years, I also got a chance to work directly with Monotype on custom fonts for a project's specific needs (wearable, tiny screen, specific DPI). Mo…

I never understood under what circumstances you would really need a custom font. Could you say more about why that was the case?

Both Netflix[0] and the company I worked at designed custom fonts to _save_ money. As other comment threads say, it's a standard practice to license by pageviews, and it can be difficult to negotiate. Alternative: just have your own custom font, exclusive and unlimited license.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/21/17147170/netflix-sans-cus...

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