Then, when you look at the other letters with bowls, or even shoulders, there’s much more difference in the stroke, which gives it a nice little push out of the neutral zone. First, the bowl of its ‘a’ is more even and reasonable. But Univers’ power comes from well-placed subtleties in its style. Helvetica’s letters are packed tight its x-height is large and attention grabbing. If there’s one thing that connects all versions and adjustments of Helvetica, it’s their density. If you’re too attached to Helvetica to let it go, this is absolutely the next best alternative.
And whereas Helvetica oblique you use on your mac was made by mechanically skewing the regular by 12 degrees, Neue Haas has smoother, more natural curves to feel like a real italic, instead of something that’s been stretched awkwardly. Whereas Helvetica’s letter widths still conform to an 18-unit system Neue Haas Grotesk has varied widths that optimise each letter properly. Completed in 2010, the typeface is perfect in a new digital font.Ĭompare Neue Haas to Helvetica and you’ll see softer curves that give it style, counters that are more rounded and relaxed yet avoid the boxed feeling of Helvetica Neue. In 2004, designer Christian Swartz was commissioned to bring the original Neue Haas Grotesk to our digital landscape. There is a subtle warmth in the shapes that was lost over the years.” – Christian Swartz “I’ve come to think that Helvetica was never intended to be the cold, perfect, rational typeface it’s portrayed to be.
Try Free Other Products Neue Haas Grotesk With Postcards you can create and edit email templates online without any coding skills! Includes more than 100 components to help you create custom emails templates faster than ever before. There are very competent and capable grotesque typefaces out there that deserve your attention. At this point, the use of Helvetica seems to imply more of a lack of expansive type knowledge than nuanced taste. Therefore, I think it’s time to look some alternatives. Helvetica has changed significantly over the decades, losing its original feeling for a cold rationale that the typeface wasn’t really designed for. It represented the strength of Swiss type, and a new age of design whose power was rooted in clarity and simplicity. Helvetica Neue is even more deviant from the original, as it stretches the width of many of its letters, rounding out counters and increasing crossbar lengths, to create a kind of faux-neutrality that feels forced and disingenuous.Īs designer Martin Perks describes, Helvetica was very much “a product of modernism”. The version we use is boxy, and lacks the fine curves that gave Helvetica its style. Since then, the typeface had to make significant design compromises to keep up with moving technology: a sloppy family expansion, an adjustment of stroke weights for the linotype machine (where the name was changed to Helvetica for international appeal), character width systems the linotype photo-setting system, and an automatic slant to the roman on digital PostScript with the Macintosh.ĭecades of readjustments across platforms changed Helvetica into something that isn’t… really Helvetica. The original typeface, Neue Haas Grotesk, was released in 1957 by the Haas foundry to compete with Akzidenz-Grotesk at Berthold. The problem is that we use and interpret Helvetica in a lot of situations it wasn’t designed for.
(You should still check individual licenses before using them.) Each font has a download link with instructions on how to embed them in your website.English Grotesque What’s wrong with Helvetica?
Be aware this increases the overall payload (just like an image does) and can have an impact on page load times.Ī great resource for free fonts with open-source licenses is Google Fonts. Embedded fonts do not need to be installed on a user's computer, instead they are downloaded as part of the page. In order to use fonts which aren't 'web safe' you'll need to use a technique known as font embedding. It is quite common to define "serif" or "sans-serif" as a final default position. In your example "HelveticaNeue-Light" will be tried first, if this font variant is unavailable the browser will try "Helvetica Neue Light" and finally "Helvetica Neue".Īs far as I'm aware "Helvetica Neue" isn't considered a 'web safe font', which means you won't be able to rely on it being installed for your entire user base. The browser will attempt to match each font name with any installed fonts on the user's machine (in the order they have been listed). They are taking a 'shotgun' approach to referencing the font.