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Helvetica Now Variable

monotype.com

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Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#171

Post by mrunseen »

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?

Why your font choice matters:

https://pimpmytype.com/open-sans/

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#172

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

>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).

so, my corporate dirty tricks campaign company could offer to make your competitors advertising costs go through the roof if I find they've been using the wrong fonts?!?

> 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.

So if companies experience expensive font download attacks I can send them a reasonably priced offer for consulting services to fix this problem!?!

'but what about ethics'

grrrr, I hate that good angel.

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#173

Post by mgdlbp »

amvp wrote: post #93

The extreme values for "Optical Size" really alter the character of the font for me. Changing the angle of the lower arc of the "e" for example really alter how the font feels, and it's unrecognisable to me as Helvetica: https://imgur.com/a/vtQZc9I

Huh, I'd assumed that ink traps would somehow be absent from fonts intended for screen use. Thinking about it now, though, it does make sense that (at least on typical computers) it's the same font file used on-screen as sent to the printer, and at small sizes on-screen they're probably hidden by hinting anyway. A cursory search also reveals that varying paper and ink conditions made for an age-old problem of achieving consistent weight.

And indeed, the distinctive spur of the 'R' all but disappears at low optical size. Something else I never noticed: the spur of the 'a' changes from vertical to horizontal at high weights in many grotesques.

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#174

Post by antihero »

mikedc wrote: post #42
antihero wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder which is the most fully featured free Helvetica clone?

TeX Gyre Heros[0] is the most faithful (to the original Helvetica masters) FOSS reproduction that I'm aware of. [0] https://ctan.org/pkg/tex-gyre-heros?lang=en

Oh man TeX Gyre. That brings me back. Good to know it’s solid!

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#175

Post by mrunseen »

StevePerkins wrote: post #75
todd3834 wrote: post #18

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.

I don't know about expecting them to be FREE. But sometimes I have to laugh at the licensing terms I see on some fonts. I have a weird fascination with fonts. They're pleasing to look at, and interesting to compare. But come on. At the end of the day, pretty much 95+% of contemporary fonts are trivial little tweaks to Garamond, Baskerville, Helvetica, Century, or some other font that hasn't been novel for centuries.…

Type design is never finished business. We do new faces, and sometimes just for the sake of novelty.

It is even not needs to be new. Helvetica was designed by Max Miedinger and released by Haas Foundry in 1957. Then it was revised in 1983 as Neue Helvetica. Later, in 2010, it was digitally revived for Bloomberg, with faith on Miedinger’s original designs, and now considered to be best digital design amongst designers (you can even see it’s been mentioned in this thread too). Is it a bad thing that it was revived, even though there were a lot of digital designs(Nimbus Sans and such)? I don’t feel so.

Why do we need new typefaces:

https://klim.co.nz/blog/why-we-need-new-typefaces/

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#176

Post by danrodney »

oefrha wrote: post #84
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).

What even is Typekit’s pricing these days? I looked into it a few weeks ago and the only thing I could find was Typekit comes with any Creative Cloud subscription, including $10/mo ones. But surely you can’t pay $10/mo to serve an arbitrary amount from their webfont CDN? Did I miss something? Is the pricing only available after you subscribe?

There are no limits on pageviews https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/plan-limits.html

And it's actually cheaper... for $4.99/month you get an InCopy subscription which includes Adobe Fonts. That's the same price as Typekit was before Adobe bought it.

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#177

Post by wizzwizz4 »

dhosek wrote: post #90
knowledge-clay wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typefaces should not be copyrightable. Print ones are not, it makes no sense that digital ones are.

That type designs are not protected is a gross injustice. The time and effort involved in creating a type design is significant. Alas, when the type industry had the resources to lobby to have copyright law changed, they were making a lot of money from stealing each others' designs and chose to lobby the opposite. There was an ill-fated effort in the 90s to lobby for typeface design protection (I was part of it as th…

That art styles are not protected is a gross injustice. The time and effort involved in creating an art style is significant. Alas, when the art industry had the resources to lobby to have copyright law changed…

Type designs not being protected by copyright has benefits, too. Afaik, they're still protected by patent. (Not everything has to be copyright law! That's something the “intellectual property” lobby seems to be wilfully ignoring.)

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#178

Post by seumars »

amhenk wrote: post #160
crazygringo wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, just... not seeing it? Can you point to any actual visual difference, something objectively measurable, as opposed to subjectively "different" or "better"? I'm feeling like I'm in crazytown, you're saying they're "very different" and the letterforms just look... virtually identical to me. Totally same personality and all. I'd wonder if I needed higher resolution, but you're talking about using them in apps, so…

I did some investigation because I was curious as well. I think one distinction is in the lowercase 'm'. Primarily around the left most stroke of the letter where the first arch of the 'm' meets. Neue Haas Grotesk's 'm' has a narrower starting stroke on the arch when it's leaving the first stroke. Whereas Helvetica has a mostly even width arch on the 'm'. This one I'm relatively uncertain on and it could be my monito…

The difference in shape between specific characters is one thing, though it's just as important to took at the typeface in use in body text, at different sizes, different line length, and so on. The fact that people here compare typography to winetasting instead of acknowledging the fact that it's a serious and intricate skill is honestly baffling and rude. Anyway, take a look at the "gestalt" example here, where you can see how Helvetica is much wider, has bigger spacing between characters and looks almost square in comparison to Neue Haas Grotesk. The rest of the article is very interesting as well: http://www.christianschwartz.com/haasgrotesk.shtml

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#179

Post by hyper_dynamics »

perardi wrote: post #15

Well by gosh, I am old enough to remember Adobe Multiple Masters… https://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/30/the-adobe-originals-silv... …a technology which went absolutely nowhere. Makes me glad to see Helvetica is now available as variable, as well as a non-trivial number of open-source fonts. https://fonts.google.com/?vfonly=true&sort=popularity (Still waiting for Roboto, though. Slab and mono are there, the main sans is…

I bought a license for Myriad Pro MM for 400 Deutsche Mark before it was cool :D

Re: Helvetica Now Variable

#180

Post by flixic »

itslennysfault wrote: post #150
flixic wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

...but was it cheaper than just finding a suitable free font(s)? However, if a design team wants to make their own font and has the resources to do so I don't see why not. It's a strong branding move.

It was cheaper than licensing a couple of fonts we liked. So we asked the designer of one of these fonts to tweak their font to our brand, and license as new IP under new name. Because it wasn't entirely "from scratch" the price was reasonable, around $50k.
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