Typography: Where Engineers and Designers Meet

Over the christmas break, my wife and I visited New York City for the first time. One of the many highlights of our trip was the Museum of Modern Art, which is running a year-long special exhibit, 50 Years of Helvetica. It's a tiny exhibit tucked away in a corner of MoMA. Blink and you'll miss it amongst all the other wonderful art. But even a small exhibit provides ample physical evidence that Helvetica-- a humble font, nothing more than a collection of mathematical curves shaped into letterforms-- had a huge impact on the world.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/01/typography-where-engineers-and-designers-meet.html

I count at least five fonts in that Apple // screenshot:

  • The words “Cracked by”
  • The words “apple mafia”
  • The words “High technology…”
  • The list of contributors
  • The list of games in the bottom frame

It’s just a nit, though. I have only a passing interest in typography per se, but I’ve done something that only the most hardcore font geeks usually do: written a font in Metafont.

Hmm… Helvetica is indeed superior to Arial.

"Microsoft chose to license for Windows simply because it was cheaper"
OMG… I thought Bill Gates was the richest person in the whole world.

Niyaz: Even so, businesses still look for the cheapest options. In this case, it leaves us with an inferior default font.

Oh, I didn’t get rich by writing a lot of cheques!

Those aren’t games in the bottom frame–it’s a list of bulletin board systems and their phone numbers that you can call with your 300 baud modem. While paying long distance fees.

“Oh, I didn’t get rich by writing a lot of cheques!”

Simpsons For The Win! :slight_smile:

Yep, the crackers had a long-standing impact on the way we use fonts, and the all-known electronic plimp-plomp techno midi music that could be found at the beginning of every cracked game or in every trainer.

I think we owe those guys a lot.

I’m surprised nobody remembers this website:

Ban Comic Sans - they even sell t-shirts
http://bancomicsans.com/home.html

Great post. Helvetica has always looked a bit mushy onscreen for me. It’s true that at some agencies there is a distinct push to move designers away from Helvetica. A lot of clients won’t accept work with Helvetica either, because they think it looks too “normal” and the knee jerk reaction is too make their project totally “original”.

That cracktro was mostly likely created with Fontrix. Interestingly, Folio was one of the typefaces available. Most of the other typefaces appeared to have been introduced in the 60s or 70s.

@EdeVau: Helvetica and Folio were introduced around the same time. Both of these typefaces were inspired by Akzidenz Grotesk.

Great post. Helvetica has always looked a bit mushy onscreen for me. It’s true that at some agencies there is a distinct push to move designers away from Helvetica. A lot of clients won’t accept work with Helvetica either, because they think it looks too “normal” and the knee jerk reaction is too make their project totally “original”.

Those crackers and their plimp-plomp techno still exist…
The plimp plomp side of things http://www.pouet.net/

My default font for coding is Verdana (8pt, very good looking on the visual studio). And I really don’t care about other areas…

Helvetica is better than Arial but let’s face it, both are pretty damn ugly. So are Times and Courier. There’s a reason why these were the freebie fonts that came with every system (Windows, Mac, PostScript printers): anyone serious about typesetting would immediately go out and by some real typefaces.

Today, thanks to rampant font piracy and excessive font bundling, most computer users probably have decent fonts on their systems, but people who don’t use PDF with embedded fonts or who just don’t know any better are still uglifying the world with the original terror trio of free fonts.

If you cherish your readers, please don’t ever use Arial, Helvetica or Times – use proper typefaces like Garamond, Minion, Myriad, Optima instead! Or even Microsoft’s newer web fonts like Lucida and Georgia. Times is for cheap newspapers, and Helvetica/Arial is for station signs.

Ban Comic Sans?!?! Are you out of your mind?! Where is the love?

How many boring PowerPoint presentations have been livened up through the use of rainbow-colored, 72 pt., Comic Sans headlines? How many people have had their day brightened just a little by the big corporate memo, with the subject set in Comic Sans?

Ban Comic Sans?! Hell, no, you barbarians!

I just recently found “Kinetic Typography”:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/kt/

I can’t remember exactly what it was, but Microsoft went with Arial over Helvetica due to either a license blocking them from using it or Helvetica was used somewhere else (and they wanted a different font but similar), it wasn’t relating to the costs. But hey, I heard that story about 10-12 years ago, I could be a little fuzzy on the details.

I too am a huge font geek, despite being terrible at design, I still love working with fonts. So I greatly appreciated the post. That book looks great!

@Chris Nahr:
“Helvetica/Arial is for station signs”

Arial is for too-cheap-to-afford-a-designer corporate stationery. Helvetica, on the other hand, is everywhere. Microsoft’s logo, for example. (I was going to say Coding Horror’s logo too, but on closer inspection I think that’s Univers)

As well as Arial, there are other Helvetica knockoffs, like the venerable Apple ‘Geneva’, and Bitstream’s ‘Swiss’ family.