7 ms·

I don't think most tech companies actually want a completely custom, radically new typeface. They want a designer to trace Helvetica so they don't have to pay l

I don't think most tech companies actually want a completely custom, radically new typeface. They want a designer to trace Helvetica so they don't have to pay licensing fees.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
endorphone 8y ago
Tiny customizations yield a unique outcome that can become more brand affiliated. But if they do just want to avoid licensing..and? If it's less expensive to go through the design and construction and acceptance and branding, then the typeface is probably a tad overpriced. A grotesque sans-serif is a grotesque sans-serif, not a rip off of Helvetica. It doesn't own that entire concept. While I find this piece interesting and informative, it seems biased in what it considers a useful outcome and what it doesn't. YouTube cutting off "random" pieces, for instance, yields a playful and unique typeface.
executesorder66 8y ago
There are good looking open source fonts. So I don't think that's true.
- oneplusone 8y ago
  I have yet to see an open source font that comes even close to a professional font like Helvetica.
  - anoncake 8y ago
    What's wrong with Nimbus Sans?
    - mark-r 8y ago
      Nimbus Sans was designed to be a complete lookalike for Helvetica. I'm not sure how they got away with it, except that the IP laws protecting fonts are rather weak. Besides, I don't think it's open source.
      - anoncake 8y ago
        Nimbus Sans is not a lookalike for Helvetica, it is a Helvetica. The visual appearance of fonts is not copyrightable. And it's GPL'd.
        Mirioron 8y ago
        What does it mean for a font to be GPL? Does it carry the license along into any project you use that font in?
        mark-r 8y ago
        The GPL version was produced to be included with Ghostscript, which itself is GPL, so that wasn't an issue. I'd be very wary of using it with any other project.
        anoncake 8y ago
        That sounds like FUD.
  - luminarious 8y ago
    Inter UI is quite impressive as far as usability goes: https://rsms.me/inter/ https://rsms.me/inter/
  - billfruit 8y ago
    I thought DejaVu Sans was pretty descent, especially as a terminal font.
  - amyjess 8y ago
    Noto. It feels like having access to an entire professional foundry as a FOSS download. Though the sans is humanist and not neo-grotesk like Helvetica. Hell, Noto Sans is available in more weights than Helvetica Neue LT Pro. I've actually found myself wishing that Helvetica Neue LT Pro had a real demi instead of jumping from medium to bold. Noto solves that problem.
  - floatboth 8y ago
    Fira Sans, PT Sans/Serif, Roboto, Noto, Source Sans/Code Pro, Cantarell...
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    Roboto is free, and very very close to Helvetica. http://theunderstatement.com/post/11645166791/roboto-vs-helvetica http://theunderstatement.com/post/11645166791/roboto-vs-helv...
- iiv 8y ago
  Just a nitpick: open source does not mean free to use.
  - phkahler 8y ago
    Substitute free to use and the statement still hold. I'm actually in favor of sites not specifying any fonts at all - only things like size, bold, italic. Let the user set a font preference in their web browser to something the find easy to read. No designer can say what is pleasing to everyone and never will. This whole thing is really just self gratification for designers.
    - Klover 8y ago
      That’s fine. It’s just a tick in Firefox to do so. Yesterday I made a readme intended for some Windows friends. Just a simple single html page. I set it to “Segoe UI”,sans-serif so it looks more like a Windows manual. If someone opens it on a mobile device or a Mac somehow, then it still looks fine. It mostly just avoids people seeing Times New Roman or Arial, which I don’t need A/B testing for to know is not as nice to look at or doesn’t look very Windows like. Unless you use Chrome, you can also go to the reader mode to avoid all the CSS. Plenty of options for you!
  - Freak_NL 8y ago
    There are a lot of good looking permissively licenced fonts as well. Often these are licenced under the SIL Open Font License (OFL).
  - Johnny555 8y ago
    Aren't all online fonts "open source"? You have to let the user download the font to display it.
- diiaann 8y ago
  I think there are plenty of good looking open source fonts, but there aren't that many super solid ones. Glyph wise, I would love to have both tabular and proportional numbers. I also want great hinting so it looks good on Windows devices. I also prefer something that isn't strongly tied to another brand like Roboto is to Android. Once you take those into account, there isn't actually a ton of options left. And if you want something that compares to the quality you get Hoefler & Co, you end up with close to zero.
wongarsu 8y ago
I suspect most want something unique for their brand identity. But as always people don't know what they want until they see it, making it very hard to make something interesting that will go through all layers of approval.
ian0 8y ago
Wow, I didn't even realise Helvetica needed a licence. Nor that its pay per click: "When purchasing your digital ad license, you specify the number of impressions your campaign will require. If you’re uncertain how many impressions you will need, you can purchase a small allotment and true up at the end of the month." https://www.fonts.com/font/linotype/helvetica/licenses https://www.fonts.com/font/linotype/helvetica/licenses
- azinman2 8y ago
  Fonts are expensive, generally.
- cosmie 8y ago
  This year I happen to work for a client that licenses all of their brand fonts. Licensed and pay-per-use fonts have easily and quickly worked their way up to the top 5 most agitating things to work with. - They track use by embedding a link to the third party font provider, which does a 302 redirect to a file on your server that requires revalidation every load. So while you host the actual file delivered to the client, you can't optimize away the time added by that needless redirect on every single pageload[1]. - On some clients, invalidating that original link will also invalidate the cache for the destination of the 302 redirect, so the user is forced to truly redownload the font each pageload. - Automated bot traffic, whether benign, malicious, search engines, or anything at all, becomes very expensive. A flood of scrapers hitting your site shifts from a minor nuisance to a very big deal. Something that your infrastructure can absorb without a hiccup can easily rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of font usage costs. You can put security measures in place to prevent some of this, but at the risk of adding friction to legitimate traffic. And don't wan't to stop legitimate bots like social media crawlers and search engines. So you can either leave the risk open ended or "fail open" where, rather than blocking a visit, you selectively decide when to include the custom font and when not to. Cloudflare's SSE[2] comes in handy for this, combined with dynamic inclusion in the server side code to exclude it from being served to legitimate bots like Googlebot which don't need the custom font. I've also experimented recently with using Cloudflare Workers for handling that process and abstracting it completely from the original site. While Cloudflare Workers also have variable pricing based on usage, it's over an order of magnitude cheaper than the usage-based pricing of the font itself, and well worth the cost. - Maintaining that added complexity, purely to cap the risk of the pay-per-view pricing model of the font, adds a needless amount of friction to the website management and development process. [1] https://www.smugmug.com/ https://www.smugmug.com/ is a site that shows this workflow. They load a font file from cloud.typography.com which 302 redirects to the real font file hosted on Smugmug's CDN. While the response is usually fairly quick, I've seen inconsistent response times from the third party providers. And the fact that in some scenarios the must-revalidate flag from the 302 response causes the cache setting from the destination font file to be ignored as well, making it get downloaded every single pageview. [2] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170036-What-does-Server-Side-Excludes-SSE-do- https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170036-W...
michaelt 8y ago
The article contains an image [1] showing several tech-company-funded fonts side-by-side. The fonts have some differences, but I'd have to agree with you the changes are so subtle it's hard to believe they resulted from an attempt to make a _radically_ new typeface. [1] https://www.arun.is/blog/custom-typefaces/unique_typefaces_mobile.jpg https://www.arun.is/blog/custom-typefaces/unique_typefaces_m...
- zuzun 8y ago
  I'd say Netflix Sans goes for the Circular look, Cereal tries to be a Proxima Nova, San Francisco is cross between Roboto and DIN and Roboto itself is a modern Univers.
  - oneplane 8y ago
    Apple also has Menlo which is designed for Terminal-type CLI usage, looks a lot like Monaco which they used before that, dating back to the classic OS. Both have elements from Courier which (to me) has a slightly more sensible set of ascenders.
- mattferderer 8y ago
  I'm curious if there are any lawsuits based on basically tracing & duplicating fonts? Does adding the slightest accent to the letter "a" allow you to trace the other 99%. Also many of these look like they just adjusted the weight ever so slightly. With variable fonts, I'm curious how this come into play when considering copyrights.
  - dmerfield 8y ago
    Per Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e) of the Code of Federal Regulations, typefaces cannot be copyrighted in the United States: https://www.bitlaw.com/source/37cfr/202_1.html https://www.bitlaw.com/source/37cfr/202_1.html Note that although the design of the typeface is not copyrightable, the computer programs which generate typefaces (‘fonts’) contain elements which are: https://www.copyright.gov/history/mls/ML-443.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/history/mls/ML-443.pdf

I don't think most tech companies actually want a completely custom, radically new typeface. They want a designer to trace Helvetica so they don't have to pay licensing fees.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

endorphone 8y ago

Tiny customizations yield a unique outcome that can become more brand affiliated. But if they do just want to avoid licensing..and? If it's less expensive to go through the design and construction and acceptance and branding, then the typeface is probably a tad overpriced. A grotesque sans-serif is a grotesque sans-serif, not a rip off of Helvetica. It doesn't own that entire concept. While I find this piece interesting and informative, it seems biased in what it considers a useful outcome and what it doesn't. YouTube cutting off "random" pieces, for instance, yields a playful and unique typeface.

executesorder66 8y ago

There are good looking open source fonts. So I don't think that's true.

oneplusone 8y ago
I have yet to see an open source font that comes even close to a professional font like Helvetica.
- anoncake 8y ago
  What's wrong with Nimbus Sans?
  - mark-r 8y ago
    Nimbus Sans was designed to be a complete lookalike for Helvetica. I'm not sure how they got away with it, except that the IP laws protecting fonts are rather weak. Besides, I don't think it's open source.
    - anoncake 8y ago
      Nimbus Sans is not a lookalike for Helvetica, it is a Helvetica. The visual appearance of fonts is not copyrightable. And it's GPL'd.
      - Mirioron 8y ago
        What does it mean for a font to be GPL? Does it carry the license along into any project you use that font in?
        mark-r 8y ago
        The GPL version was produced to be included with Ghostscript, which itself is GPL, so that wasn't an issue. I'd be very wary of using it with any other project.
        anoncake 8y ago
        That sounds like FUD.
- luminarious 8y ago
  Inter UI is quite impressive as far as usability goes: https://rsms.me/inter/ https://rsms.me/inter/
- billfruit 8y ago
  I thought DejaVu Sans was pretty descent, especially as a terminal font.
- amyjess 8y ago
  Noto. It feels like having access to an entire professional foundry as a FOSS download. Though the sans is humanist and not neo-grotesk like Helvetica. Hell, Noto Sans is available in more weights than Helvetica Neue LT Pro. I've actually found myself wishing that Helvetica Neue LT Pro had a real demi instead of jumping from medium to bold. Noto solves that problem.
- floatboth 8y ago
  Fira Sans, PT Sans/Serif, Roboto, Noto, Source Sans/Code Pro, Cantarell...
- jjeaff 8y ago
  Roboto is free, and very very close to Helvetica. http://theunderstatement.com/post/11645166791/roboto-vs-helvetica http://theunderstatement.com/post/11645166791/roboto-vs-helv...
iiv 8y ago
Just a nitpick: open source does not mean free to use.
- phkahler 8y ago
  Substitute free to use and the statement still hold. I'm actually in favor of sites not specifying any fonts at all - only things like size, bold, italic. Let the user set a font preference in their web browser to something the find easy to read. No designer can say what is pleasing to everyone and never will. This whole thing is really just self gratification for designers.
  - Klover 8y ago
    That’s fine. It’s just a tick in Firefox to do so. Yesterday I made a readme intended for some Windows friends. Just a simple single html page. I set it to “Segoe UI”,sans-serif so it looks more like a Windows manual. If someone opens it on a mobile device or a Mac somehow, then it still looks fine. It mostly just avoids people seeing Times New Roman or Arial, which I don’t need A/B testing for to know is not as nice to look at or doesn’t look very Windows like. Unless you use Chrome, you can also go to the reader mode to avoid all the CSS. Plenty of options for you!
- Freak_NL 8y ago
  There are a lot of good looking permissively licenced fonts as well. Often these are licenced under the SIL Open Font License (OFL).
- Johnny555 8y ago
  Aren't all online fonts "open source"? You have to let the user download the font to display it.
diiaann 8y ago
I think there are plenty of good looking open source fonts, but there aren't that many super solid ones. Glyph wise, I would love to have both tabular and proportional numbers. I also want great hinting so it looks good on Windows devices. I also prefer something that isn't strongly tied to another brand like Roboto is to Android. Once you take those into account, there isn't actually a ton of options left. And if you want something that compares to the quality you get Hoefler & Co, you end up with close to zero.

wongarsu 8y ago

I suspect most want something unique for their brand identity. But as always people don't know what they want until they see it, making it very hard to make something interesting that will go through all layers of approval.

ian0 8y ago

Wow, I didn't even realise Helvetica needed a licence. Nor that its pay per click: "When purchasing your digital ad license, you specify the number of impressions your campaign will require. If you’re uncertain how many impressions you will need, you can purchase a small allotment and true up at the end of the month." https://www.fonts.com/font/linotype/helvetica/licenses https://www.fonts.com/font/linotype/helvetica/licenses

azinman2 8y ago
Fonts are expensive, generally.
cosmie 8y ago
This year I happen to work for a client that licenses all of their brand fonts. Licensed and pay-per-use fonts have easily and quickly worked their way up to the top 5 most agitating things to work with. - They track use by embedding a link to the third party font provider, which does a 302 redirect to a file on your server that requires revalidation every load. So while you host the actual file delivered to the client, you can't optimize away the time added by that needless redirect on every single pageload[1]. - On some clients, invalidating that original link will also invalidate the cache for the destination of the 302 redirect, so the user is forced to truly redownload the font each pageload. - Automated bot traffic, whether benign, malicious, search engines, or anything at all, becomes very expensive. A flood of scrapers hitting your site shifts from a minor nuisance to a very big deal. Something that your infrastructure can absorb without a hiccup can easily rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of font usage costs. You can put security measures in place to prevent some of this, but at the risk of adding friction to legitimate traffic. And don't wan't to stop legitimate bots like social media crawlers and search engines. So you can either leave the risk open ended or "fail open" where, rather than blocking a visit, you selectively decide when to include the custom font and when not to. Cloudflare's SSE[2] comes in handy for this, combined with dynamic inclusion in the server side code to exclude it from being served to legitimate bots like Googlebot which don't need the custom font. I've also experimented recently with using Cloudflare Workers for handling that process and abstracting it completely from the original site. While Cloudflare Workers also have variable pricing based on usage, it's over an order of magnitude cheaper than the usage-based pricing of the font itself, and well worth the cost. - Maintaining that added complexity, purely to cap the risk of the pay-per-view pricing model of the font, adds a needless amount of friction to the website management and development process. [1] https://www.smugmug.com/ https://www.smugmug.com/ is a site that shows this workflow. They load a font file from cloud.typography.com which 302 redirects to the real font file hosted on Smugmug's CDN. While the response is usually fairly quick, I've seen inconsistent response times from the third party providers. And the fact that in some scenarios the must-revalidate flag from the 302 response causes the cache setting from the destination font file to be ignored as well, making it get downloaded every single pageview. [2] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170036-What-does-Server-Side-Excludes-SSE-do- https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170036-W...

michaelt 8y ago

The article contains an image [1] showing several tech-company-funded fonts side-by-side. The fonts have some differences, but I'd have to agree with you the changes are so subtle it's hard to believe they resulted from an attempt to make a _radically_ new typeface. [1] https://www.arun.is/blog/custom-typefaces/unique_typefaces_mobile.jpg https://www.arun.is/blog/custom-typefaces/unique_typefaces_m...

zuzun 8y ago
I'd say Netflix Sans goes for the Circular look, Cereal tries to be a Proxima Nova, San Francisco is cross between Roboto and DIN and Roboto itself is a modern Univers.
- oneplane 8y ago
  Apple also has Menlo which is designed for Terminal-type CLI usage, looks a lot like Monaco which they used before that, dating back to the classic OS. Both have elements from Courier which (to me) has a slightly more sensible set of ascenders.
mattferderer 8y ago
I'm curious if there are any lawsuits based on basically tracing & duplicating fonts? Does adding the slightest accent to the letter "a" allow you to trace the other 99%. Also many of these look like they just adjusted the weight ever so slightly. With variable fonts, I'm curious how this come into play when considering copyrights.
- dmerfield 8y ago
  Per Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e) of the Code of Federal Regulations, typefaces cannot be copyrighted in the United States: https://www.bitlaw.com/source/37cfr/202_1.html https://www.bitlaw.com/source/37cfr/202_1.html Note that although the design of the typeface is not copyrightable, the computer programs which generate typefaces (‘fonts’) contain elements which are: https://www.copyright.gov/history/mls/ML-443.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/history/mls/ML-443.pdf