Try these free alternatives to Helvetica. Designed by Matthew Carter and Hans-Jürg Hunziker for cold type. Erik Spiekermann was the design consultant and designed the literature for the launch in 1983. The rights to Helvetica are now held by Monotype Imaging, which acquired Linotype; the Neue Haas Grotesk digitisation (discussed below) was co-released with Font Bureau.[4]. The family includes eight fonts in eight weights and one width, without italics (25, 35, 45, 55, 65, 75, 85, 95). Users include Bloomberg Businessweek and the Whitney Museum. "Neue Haas Grotesk" makes it sound like a second cousin of Akzidenz Grotesk that’s just stumbled in from the hinterlands. Helvetica has become one of the most popular fonts in the world. Google Font Alternatives. 17—More on Helvetica in the United States", "Blue Pencil no. It lends an air of lucid efficiency to any typographic message with its clean, no-nonsense shapes. [35], In the European Union, Helvetica is legally required to be used for health warnings on tobacco products such as cigarettes. [47], Road signs in Japan and South Korea formerly used Helvetica. It is considered to be a highly conflicted design, as Helvetica is seen as a spare and rational typeface and swashes are ostentatious: font designer Mark Simonson described it as "almost sacrilegious". [170] Larabie's company Typodermic offers Coolvetica in a wide variety of weights and widths as a commercial release, with the semi-bold as freeware taster. [42] Amtrak used the typeface on the "pointless arrow" logo, and it was adopted by Danish railway company DSB for a time period. The exhibition included a timeline of Helvetica over the last fifty years, its antecedents and its subsequent influence, including in the local area. [15][16] The design was popular: Paul Shaw suggests that Helvetica "began to muscle out" Akzidenz-Grotesk in New York City from around summer 1965, when Amsterdam Continental, which imported European typefaces, stopped pushing Akzidenz-Grotesk in its marketing and began to focus on Helvetica instead. Helvetica, initially released as Neue Haas Grotesk and designed by Max Miedinger in 1957 is a typical sans serif font family. The design may be protected in certain jurisdictions. [45], The typeface was displaced from some uses in the 1990s to the increased availability of other fonts on digital desktop publishing systems, and criticism from type designers including Erik Spiekermann and Martin Majoor, both of whom have criticised the design for its omnipresence and overuse. Designed by Nadine Chahine, Linotype Design Studio, Monotype Design Studio and Edik Ghabuzyan, it is a version of Neue Helvetica with support of Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Armenian, Georgian and Vietnamese scripts for total 181 languages, and complete support of Unicode block u+0400. [113][114][115] The family has one width in three optical sizes, Text, Micro and Display in 8, 6, and 10 weights respectively. The studio manager was Wolfgang Schimpf, and his assistant was Reinhard Haus; the manager of the project was René Kerfante. Wide capitals of uniform width, particularly obvious in the wide 'E' and 'F'. This is especially visible in the t, r, f, and C. Arial employs slanted stroke cuts, following Monotype Grotesque. In April 2019, Monotype announced an update of Neue Helvetica called "Helvetica Now", designed by Jan Hendrik Weber and Charles Nix of Monotype Imaging. [75](Another reason for the lateness in officially adapting Helvetica to Cyrillic was that relatively few Cyrillic letters have ascenders, meaning that any mixed-case text is more difficult to vertically space and thus the text would lack the compact Swiss aesthetic for which Helvetica is famous without cutting the line height so narrow as to overlap characters and clutter the text. Like many neo-grotesque designs, Helvetica has narrow apertures, which limits its legibility onscreen and at small print sizes. The family consists of four fonts in two weights and one width, with complementary italics. The quiz game show Jeopardy! Lowvetica , inspired by Helvetica, is shorter and squatter and, as it says in its description, "eliminates all highs and lows." OpenType features include numerators/denominators, fractions, ligatures, scientific inferiors, subscript/superscript. [48] It switched in 2017 to the custom IBM Plex family, concluding that a custom open-source typeface would be more distinctive and practical, as it could be freely distributed and installed without rights issues.