![]() ![]() The need to produce individual sizes of typefaces declined further with the advent of photocomposition in the mid-twentieth century. While Benton’s machine sped up production by automating the scaling of letterforms, the different sizes had identical, non-optimized character shapes. They adapted the character shapes of a typeface design to be as legible and structurally sound as possible at each point size they cut-skillfully, painstakingly, and one letter at a time.Īround the turn of the twentieth century, Linn Boyd Benton’s invention of the pantographic engraving machine for type design marked the first inkling of the change to come. Punchcutters, the unsung heroes of their time, played a crucial role in the production of type. Once hardened, individual letters were composed into text for printing. A matrix would then be set in a hand mold and filled with molten metal type alloy. These punches, typically cut in steel, were used to stamp glyphs into softer metal to form matrices. ![]() Joshua Darden’s sprawling Freight, from GarageFonts, comes in several optical sizes designed to preserve the typeface’s integrity across a wide range of applications.Īs Johannes Gutenberg’s movable-type printing system gained traction in fifteenth-century Europe, once a typeface was designed, a punchcutter would physically cut its characters in hard metal to produce punches. ![]() Historically, though, when type was cast in metal, a different font had to be created for every size. That may sound odd to contemporary ears digital typefaces are, of course, scalable. These are some of the names used to describe optical sizes-different cuts of a typeface family that have been designed to work within a certain range. The Thin weight (originally requested by Bloomberg Businessweek) is very fine, very thin indeed, and reveals the true skeleton of these iconic letterforms.Īvailable as a family of OpenType fonts with a very large Pro character set, Neue Haas Grotesk supports most Central European and many Eastern European languages.Micro, Text, Deck, Display, Headline, Banner, Big. Schwartz's revival of the original Helvetica, his new Neue Haas Grotesk, comes complete with a number of Max Miedinger's alternates, including a flat-legged R.Įight display weights, from Thin to Black, plus a further three weights drawn specifically for text make this much more than a revival - it's a versatile, well-drawn grot with all the right ingredients. During the 1980s, the family was redrawn and released as Neue Helvetica. The Regular and Bold weights of Helvetica were redesigned for the Linotype machine those alterations remained when Helvetica was adapted for phototypesetting. What was lost in Neue Haas Grotesk's transition to the digital Helvetica of today, has been resurrected in this faithful digital revival. Christian Schwartz says Neue Haas Grotesk was originally produced for typesetting by hand in a range of sizes from 5 to 72 points, but digital Helvetica has always been one-size-fits-all, which leads to unfortunate compromises."""" Schwartz's digital revival sets the record straight, so to speak. Some of the features that made Neue Haas Grotesk so good were expunged or altered owing to comprimises dictated by technological changes. But, over the years, Helvetica would move away from its roots. The original metal Neue Haas Grotesk™ would, in the late 1950s become Helvetica®. ![]()
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