Welcome to the 14th installment of 26 Days of Type. And Happy Valentine’s Day! I thought it might be appropriate today to open with a sonnet, and who better to write a love poem to this “coldest”, most “sterile” of typeface genres, than ChatGPT?
In fonts austere, their love does thrive, Neo-Grotesque, where clean lines strive. In Helvetica’s grip, Univers does jive, Their bond serene, in typographic hive.
No ornamentation, no extravagant hue, Each character precise, in its rigid milieu. No fancy curves, no embellishment true, Their passion restrained, in a minimalist view.
In stark embrace, they share their domain, No excess here, in this textual terrain. Their love in simplicity, an unadorned refrain, Yet in their austerity, a beauty plain.
So here’s to Helvetica, to Univers fair, In fonts austere, their love they bear.
Love poem to Univers & Helvetica, written by ChatGPT
🤢
I’ve featured a number of Grotesque typefaces so far in this series, including Epilogue, Franklin Gothic, Halyard, and Karla. Today I’m taking a look at a sub-classification of this genre, the Neo-Grotesque.
Univers was the official typeface of the state university I attended (still is!). I used this typeface a lot as an intern in the marketing and communications office. I avoided it for my student projects, and while I admire and respect Adrian Frutiger, I haven’t really touched Univers since those days.
Early type specimens for Univers (left) and Helvetica (right)
1957 is an important year in typographic history, being when these two typefaces (and Folio as well!) were released, ushering in the International (or “Swiss”) Typographic Style. These designs draw inspiration from Berthold’s Akzidenz Grotesk, a typeface released at the end of the 19th Century. Neo-Grotesques feature low-contrast stokes and usually tall x-heights. Instead of “true italics”, these fonts often have sloped, angled forms called obliques. Because of the consistency of form and uniformity in detail, Neo-Grotesques are said to take on a “neutral” appearance.
If you’ve used Arial on the web, in an email, or a document, you know the Neo-Grotesque genre. Everyone has a version of this typeface. In 2014, Monotype began redrawing and rebuilding Helvetica from the ground up in a new version called Helvetica® Now. Apple uses its own San Francisco font in its operating systems. VICE and CNN both have their own proprietary versions now.
If you can’t get enough of this genre, independent type designers have their own Neo-Grotesques, too. Swiss foundry Optimo has Theinhardt, released in 2009. Kris Sowersby released Untitled Sans in 2017 and Söhne in 2019, both through Klim Type Foundry. Ty Finck created his own, “better Helvetica”, Def Sans, released in 2023.
A comparison between key glyphs in a few different Neo-Grotesques with Akzidenz Grotesk.
A comparison between key glyphs in a few different Neo-Grotesques with Akzidenz Grotesk.
A comparison between key glyphs in a few different Neo-Grotesques with Akzidenz Grotesk.
When should I use a Neo-Grotesque?
I don’t want to say these are neutral or unopinionated, because something like Helvetica, which as been around for 60+ years, has plenty of cultural baggage. All typefaces have personality. That said, the uniformity and lack of idiosyncrasy of the shapes in a Neo-Grotesque might be more appealing for certain contexts, compared to grotesques or humanist sans-serifs.
I would choose very carefully whether you are setting type at a body or text size, or for a headline. I think Helvetica has been redesigned so many times because of its legibility issues at text sizes. UI fonts like San Francisco and Inter are optimized for legibility, but don’t look stellar (in my opinion) at large display sizes. Early in my design education and career, I found Univers a better option for both text and display. These days I’d reach for a family with a rage of optical sizes (micro, text, and display).
We’re halfway through the alphabet today, and up until now I’ve barely mentioned the monospaced classification. These fonts are derived from typewriters and early computing, but are still very useful today.
A monospaced typeface differs from a proportional typeface in that each character space is the same width. It doesn’t necessarily mean that each glyph within each space is exactly the same width, but that characters will align from line to line. Monospaced fonts are optimized for legibility, and are usually marked by features like a compressed m (a wider character in proportional faces) and serifs on the i, even if the monospaced font is otherwise free of serifs.
Coders/programmers/developers, however they identify, spend a lot of time in their code editors each day building software. I know some folks who are very particular about the color theme, font size, and monospaced font they use. Me? I use Menlo (I had to crack open VSCode to double-check) a font which was Apple’s default monospace from 2009 – 2015.
Monospaced type is also used to denote code samples on the web, like in this CSS example below:
If you are interested in trying out some different monospaced fonts for code, there’s an excellent website called Programming Fonts, where you can try out 142 examples, most of them open source. The old CSS-Tricks (RIP) had a neat microsite (Internet Archive link) that let you see visual examples. It featured a smaller selection, but there were a few more paid fonts in the examples.
Some fine programming fonts on GitHub
JetBrains Mono by Philipp Nurullin and Konstantin Bulenkov.
Monospaced fonts don’t have to be restricted to coding or code examples, but they do give off a techie or typewritten vibe.
Space Mono, developed by Colophon Foundry for Google Design, was not envisioned as a programming font, but for “editorial use in headline and display typography.”
[T]he letterforms infuse a geometric foundation and grotesque details with qualities often found in headline typefaces of the 1960s (See: Microgramma, Eurostile), many of which have since been co-opted by science fiction films, television, and literature.
The newer tech journalism upstart 404 Media uses Space Mono (in all caps) in the masthead, navigation, and supporting text throughout their website, paired with Space Grotesk for headlines and Inter for body text. Oak Studios uses Input Mono for their website body type, with headings in Tiempos Headline.
Typewriter fonts like Courier also have their place in digital design. A throwback to the 1950s, Courier New is one of 9 standard “web safe fonts” and is standard in every kind of modern computer and web browser. 12pt. Courier is the industry standard for Hollywood screenplays, and up until 2004, the official font for the U.S. State Department. Be aware that some “typewriter fonts” are not true monospaced designs, such as American Typewriter, which is a proportionally spaced slab-serif.
The Good Enough website is quite minimal, and uses the IBM Plex Mono typeface (which has typewriter heritage in its DNA) to straightforward effect. Murray’s Cheese uses Vulf Mono as a supporting typeface for the “tasting notes” under each product on their website.
What follows isn’t legal advice. If you do need legal advice, please find a lawyer. I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the internet.
With that out of the way, I am ready to tackle what is probably the most challenging topic in this series so far: Licensing fonts. And this might be my longest post in the series to date, clocking in at nearly 1,600 words. After researching this topic and reading a dozen or so End User Licensing Agreements (EULA), I completely understand why so many organizations large and small default to using Google Fonts.
This is not an exhaustive list of every option out there. Rather, I wanted to highlight a few specific licenses and a few creative models out there for licensing type.
Reading this article is not a substitute for reading the license(s) when you download or buy fonts, or recommend them for a client project. In addition to reading the license, you should also keep a copy of it for every font downloaded to your computer.
The difference between personal and commercial use
If you haven’t noticed already, most of the fonts I’ve featured in my 26 Days of Type series are available in the Google Fonts or Adobe Fonts libraries. These are both popular sources for typography, and the terms and conditions in both services generously cover both personal and commercial use. I wanted to keep this series accessible to a wide audience, and so that is why I spend so much time talking about Google and Adobe Fonts.
Personal use usually means you are using a font to try it and evaluate it on your own, or you’re working on a student project. Commercial use could mean using a font to create a logo for a client, or designing a T-shirt to be sold on an online marketplace, or developing a website for a fundraising purpose. Oliver at Pimp My Type has written a great explainer on personal vs. commercial use:
Personal is basically anything that is not intended to make any money in a direct or an indirect way. If it’s not personal, it’s commercial.
Oliver Schöndorfer
Years ago, I heard the story of an intern who cost their agency thousands of dollars by using a trial or personal use font in a client project that went to production. I understand that is not a life or death scenario; just an example that there are risks to ignoring the different kinds of licenses out there on the web.
Open source font licenses
The majority of open source fonts including those on Google and Bunny.net use the SIL Open Font License (OFL). This license allows you to do make just about anything with the fonts and use them anywhere, including modifying a font and redistributing it. The main thing you can’t do is sell any OFL-licensed fonts or OFL-derived fonts.
Another great place to find good SIL OFL fonts is Open Foundry, including some that aren’t on Google. Free Faces is a curated gallery of typefaces available under a variety of free licenses. Besides the OFL, other popular open source licenses for fonts include the Apache license and the Ubuntu Font License.
Fontshare: a mixture of open and closed source designs
Fontshare by Indian Type Foundry (ITF) is another great place on the web to find quality type free for personal and commercial use. What’s important to know here are that there are two kinds of licenses: OFL which I explained above, and ITF’s Free Font License (FFL), which doesn’t allow you re-sell or to redistribute derivative fonts based on ITF designs.
Adobe Fonts: generous, but restrictive in one important way
If you are a Creative Cloud subscriber, you have access to thousands of fonts through Adobe Fonts, which can be used for both personal and commercial use. The Adobe Fonts license FAQ page covers many scenarios you might use these fonts in. Commercial use includes embedding Adobe Fonts on your own personal or company website.
It’s a generous license, but here’s the caveat: If you are creating something for a client to modify and use on their own (an InDesign template for a menu for example), they must have their own Creative Cloud subscription. Similarly, you can’t host the webfonts for a client’s website in your own Adobe account: Your client will need their own Creative Cloud subscription.
The Terms of Use do not permit reselling beyond December 31, 2019. After that time, the client’s website must load Adobe Fonts from their own Creative Cloud subscription to ensure that there isn’t any interruption to the font licensing or web font hosting.
Please refer to the full Terms of Use for more information on what reselling the service means, and related definitions.
The typeface selection on Adobe Fonts is wonderful, but as a platform for type, it feels a bit like Spotify does for music. Your subscription gives you access to this great stuff, but you don’t really own anything. If you’re investing in typography for your brand, perhaps you want to have a more stable license to these things. I’ve seen fonts come and go and pop back on the platform. I’m also left wondering how much money are the smaller foundries and designers making off this relationship?
“Pay-what-you-want” foundries
Lost Type Co-Op, started in 2011, was one of the first type foundries on the web to offer a pay-what-you-want license for personal use. Commercial license prices vary depending on the typeface or type family, and the number of computers it will be installed on.
Atipo is another foundry offering a pay-what-you-want license (they have recommended starting prices for fonts and font packages). What’s nice about their webfont offering is that is covers a single website, but unlimited pageviews.
Alanna Munro also sells fonts with a pay-what-you-can model for personal use. Her licensing page is very detailed, but easy to read.
Ty Finck also sells his typefaces online. His fonts are a great deal: for one price, you get both desktop and webfonts. There’s one price for commercial and personal use, no renewals, and (I’m pretty sure) you can use the webfonts on more than one website. He has a helpful TL;DR on his licensing page (though like I said, you should read the full license).
Lettermatic is a newer foundry that makes some great-looking typefaces. They have a pretty simple licensing model, with pricing for three tiers of end users: Students, Freelancers, and Companies. There are no renewals either: “Your license is perpetual as long as your company size, or status as a Student or Freelancer remains accurate.”
More standard EULAs
By now you might have noticed a pattern. Outside of the open source licenses and subscription models, every type foundry pretty much has their own license and End User Licensing Agreements (EULA).
Okay Type uses what they call a “modular EULA“, where the terms for using their fonts are in different addendums for Desktop, Website, and Apps. Desktop pricing is based on the number of users. Website pricing is based on the number of pageviews. Okay Type also has a helpful FAQ page.
Sharp Type’s licensing page, is a starting point for different EULAs for Desktop, Web, and App licenses, as well as contact information for Broadcast and Retail Merchandising. Again, pricing is based on desktop users, website pageviews, and app monthly active users.
One thing I’ve noticed about most smaller foundries is that they are pretty open to answering questions about their licenses, so if anything is unclear, send them an email!
Buying from the juggernaut
I’m highlighting MyFonts.com only because they are one of the bigger players in retail fonts and owned by Monotype Imaging, the juggernaut of type companies. With most fonts on MyFonts, there is a separate EULA for each of the following:
App
Electronic Doc (including PDFs)
Digital Ad/Email
Webfonts (“MyFonts offers three types of webfont licenses: Annual, Pay Once, and Pay As You Go. Only one of these three would be available for a given webfont.”)
I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface in this installment. I thought about including the unique model of Future Fonts, but the EULAs vary, since each type designer on that platform is independent. I didn’t even get into the font renting model, which you can do with apps like Fontstand. I welcome any corrections and suggestions for improving this post, too. Hope this was helpful.
Once more, this time in bold text:
This article isn’t legal advice. If you do need legal advice please find a lawyer. I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the internet.
The indie web shrinking wasn’t really the fault of social media companies and other “big tech”. It was the fault of people who abandoned their own little place on the net.
I just can’t get enough of these quirky-looking grotesques. This time around we’re looking at Karla, an open-source design by Jonny Pinhorn and released by Google Fonts in 2012. After Google, Pinhorn went on to the Indian Type Foundry (ITF), and is now at Dalton Maag.
Is it just me, or do the oblique/italic styles take on a more condensed appearance?
As far as free fonts go, this one has a bit of personality and is full of quirks. One of these is the spacing and kerning seem a bit off. In spite of these imperfections, it’s one I’ve seen all over the web for the last decade, and I seem to not get sick of it. I dig the circular forms in the punctuation and dots of the i and j. The a, g, 6, 9, and the & all have a bit of a bouncy, playful feel to them.
Oh, a music player UI. Isn’t that cute.
Karla was forked into a project called Karmilla to support more languages. Because this is an open source design that has been around for a while, you’re likely to find Karla in a lot of templates and free WordPress themes, etc. If you’re looking for something with a similar vibe (and better kerning), try one of these:
I’ve been thinking about this post by Todd Libby for a couple days now. 💔 I refuse to believe there is such thing as a “tech community.” There is a “tech industry,” however, and it has chewed up and spat out countless talented people.
I hope the next thing you find is fulfilling, Todd. And know this: you motivated and inspired a lot of people (including me) who will keep fighting the good fight.
When I started planning out 26 Days of Type, I had a sense I would be writing about my design school education, when I really started taking notice of visual culture, or was at least developing the vocabulary for it. And this would mean I’d be risking nostalgia.
Realizing this risk, I knew I wanted to wrote about Emigre and Zuzana Licko. Emigre, Inc. is the type foundry run by Licko and her husband Rudy VanderLans in Berkeley, California. Licko designed most of the fonts for Emigre, the magazine VanderLans edited and art directed. The mid-1980s to early ’90s a time where desktop publishing was on the rise, but few people were designing and making digital fonts for personal computers. Licko was pushing the limits of the digital type production tools available and created unique faces like Matrix, Triplex, and Citizen.
While I was a design student in the mid 2000s, Emigre the magazine was publishing its final issues. In their late 1980s and early ’90s heyday, they were printing punk stuff like this, which was the kind of thing I gravitated toward:
This kind of design is so hard to do well, and it was already out of fashion by the time I came along. Image from the Letterform Archive.
This kind of design is so hard to do well, and it was already out of fashion by the time I came along. Image from the Letterform Archive.
This kind of design is so hard to do well, and it was already out of fashion by the time I came along. Image from the Letterform Archive.
Picking just one of Licko’s typefaces proved tricky in my alphabetical framework. I decided to pick Journal for a challenge, since it’s not super-popular (Filosofia and Mrs. Eaves are much more widely used) and I couldn’t find much information on it. There’s not a full specimen book available to download, either.
Here’s what Emigre, Inc. has to say about the creation of Journal:
Licko wanted to try her hand at an old style stress design, but found the curves difficult to draw with the relatively primitive font tools of the day. The geometric arc curves employed in Triplex, Matrix, and other designs that she had designed previously were easier to create with these early tools because arc curves are more predictable from a construction standpoint and therefore easier to envision. In fact, it was not so much the drawing tools that were the problem, but the preview display. The screen display was not very faithful to the mathematical digital drawing, nor the laser printout, due to the primitive screen rasterizer, and the coarse resolution screen on the monitor. Remember, this was before anti-aliased screens and stochastic ink jet printing came to personal computing.
Taking a magnifying glass to the 300 dpi printouts, Licko studied how the curves were represented by a series of stair stepped lines on the black and white (non-aliased) grid of the laser printed page. This inspired the designer to construct her new typeface with straight line segments instead of curves; approximating each curve by a series of tangent polylines. This not only solved the screen display preview problem, but gave Journal a rustic look, which nicely complimented the old style stress. The subtle crudeness is reminiscent of the irregularities that appear in letterpress printed specimens, and evokes informal qualities, making Journal suitable for correspondence.
There’s something beautiful about a new thing born out of the technological limitations of its time. I’m particularly drawn to the jagged and spiky quality of the letters at medium to large sizes, and how the bold weight almost takes on it’s own personality. Although Journal was designed for the magazine, I was flipping through Emigre’s early 1990s issues on the Letterform Archive, and didn’t come across examples of it being used for text. Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough.
Journal text at display size. I can see this treatment being used with a humanist sans-serif for contrast.
There are quite a few other typefaces with Journal in the name, by the way:
Alda is a text face I quite like. It was designed by Berton Hasebe in 2008, and doesn’t really look like anything else out there.
Brothers is kind of a 19th century revival display typeface designed by Jonathan Downer. This was everywhere in branding the late 2000s – 2010s
Cardea is a beautiful text face by David Cabianca, released in 2004.
Cholla and Cholla Slab is kind of a weird-looking family I’d love to see used more. This one was developed by Sibylle Hagmann and came out in 1999.
Dead History and Keedy Sans both play with contrasting shapes, angles, and roundness. These two scream “1990s design” to me.
Fairplex is another great design by Licko. This is a wonderfully executed example of a low-contrast serif.
The Lo-Res family are updated versions of Licko’s early bitmap fonts, the ones that appear in the early issues of Emigre magazine.
Template Gothic by Barry Deck is another one that screams 1990s design. It was used in the logo for the first season of Survivor, before they switched to the Survivor logo we know and love today.
Vendetta, another John Downer face, from 1999. This one’s a revival of old style Venetian type.
Emigre’s history is full of rich, expressive visual material. To spend more time with the output of Licko, VanderLans and the crew visit the following links:
Back before I started making and keeping lists of fonts, I did what I imagine a “normal” person might do. I started out typing out my text (maybe a headline or a paragraph) into a word processor or design app, and would literally go through the font menu one by one, until something interesting popped up. That was how I came across this:
A complete approximation of my design. I truly can’t remember the content at all.
I kind of liked it! That heading feels wrong, in a weirdly satisfying way. Was this a lost Emigre font from the 1990s? I looked up closer at the font menu: Bell Centennial BT. The weight was Bold Listing. Here was the phone book font, teaching me all about ink traps.
Maybe the most unique of Bell Centennial’s forms are in place to solve problems during production. Since the phonebook is printed at high speeds and on low-quality paper, the ink has a tendency to spread out on the paper (this effect is called “dot gain”). Since the slightest spread greatly effects the shape of such small letterforms, [Matthew] Carter incorporated notches (called “ink traps”) at the corners for compensation.
Ink traps are features from metal typesetting, especially at small sizes, that prevent ink from pooling or bleeding at the intersection of certain strokes. (The first time I used a letterpress machine was a few years after college) Printing technology has changed, but this carryover from the hot metal days is still being employed by digital type designers.
At large sizes and bold weights, Halyard Micro‘s numbers take on an expressive appearance.
A digital type designer might employ ink traps into their design if they are designing for small optical sizes. Check out Retina by Tobias Frere-Jones for an excellent example. If a newer typeface is referencing historical designs, ink traps might come into play, as with Bricolage Grotesque, one of my new favorite libre web fonts. Or the ink traps might take on a life of their own, as in Dinamo’s Whyte Inktrap, and Type Forward’s Oddvall. Who says a sans-serif can’t be decorative?
I wrote about the Halyard family in yesterday’s edition of 26 Days of Type, and I want to spend a little more time examining the Micro version. In the samples below, I showcase the Micro weights and italic styles at large sizes (240 pt in my Illustrator file) to demonstrate how changes in weights alter the appearance of the ink traps and the characters themselves. I especially wanted to highlight the 8 in this example:
Halyard Micro (upright) in 8 weights: ExtraLight to Black
Halyard Micro (upright) in 8 weights: ExtraLight to Black
Halyard Micro (upright) in 8 weights: ExtraLight to Black
Halyard Micro italics in 8 weights: ExtraLight to Black
That lowercase x though…
Don’t fall into a trap
I think it’s a bit trendy right now to use ink trap fonts at exaggerated sizes. So like all trends, this might look dated in a few years. I also have my own unanswered questions about the legibility/readability of certain characters at various sizes. Remember that these little details may be forgiving in one area, and a nightmare in other places. I would avoid ink traps in anything embroidered or screen-printed, unless you are a fan of “happy accidents”1. But if you truly are printing small type on cheap paper, ink traps have not worn out their utility.
A low-contrast sans serif is always a safer option in embroidery and screen-printing. ↩︎
I’m working in the Art Department of Sesame Street, and I made plenty of letters and numbers for the 41st season. Most were made out of foamcore or blue foam, but I did make some “7’s” that I scored so that they would break apart easily when Cookie Monster chomped on them.
