Monotype Launches Helvetica Now Variable Font (2024)

FAQs

Monotype Launches Helvetica Now Variable Font? ›

Helvetica Now Variable, new from the Monotype Studio, offers more than a million new Helvetica styles in one state-of-the-art font file, allowing you to create infinite shades of expression, incredible typographic animations, and ultra-refined typography.

A version in variable font format was released in July 2021. It supports three axes; weight, width, and optical size.

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.

Helvetica Now Display evens out the kerning, or letter spacing, for larger type sizes. Helvetica Now Text, the workhorse of the three, is intended for visually “crowded” use cases, so it incorporates more white space into the design for greater legibility and less reader fatigue.

Variable fonts—or, more specifically, OpenType Font Variations—are a relatively new font format introduced in 2016 that allow one font file to contain multiple stylistic variations, and thus break down the strict delineations of “traditional” (static) fonts. Weight, width, style, optical size, etc.

You can quickly identify variable fonts by the “dot” that appears next to them in the font picker. You can also check how many variations they support right from the font picker by hovering over the “dot.”

Legibility is the ease at which letters can be differentiated from each other. In the case of Helvetica, some characters are quite hard to tell apart. In the image below you can see that at small sizes, some of the letter combinations of Helvetica become disastrous both in terms of legibility and readability.

Helvetica is a widely used sans serif typeface that has been popular in publishing since the 1960s. Commonly used alternatives to Helvetica include Arial and Swiss.

What free font is closest to Helvetica? ›

Arial is the more rounded typeface of the two, with softer, fuller curves and open counters. In contrast to the Helvetica typeface, Arial has an overall less elegant feel and a blander appearance. It also has a diagonal terminal on the t as well as the numeral 1, and a curved tail on the capital Q.

Helvetica's success might be explained by its unique characteristics which include a tall x-height, making the typeface easier to read at distance, as well as the unusually tight spacing between letters that give the typeface a dense, solid appearance, making it perfect for capturing headlines.

Traditionally, all possible weights and styles have been separated out into different font files, whereas variable fonts combine all of those variations into one. Because of this, overall file size is greatly reduced compared to loading multiple individual font files—and that's a key consideration for web typography.

Variable fonts offer a range of advantages for communication design, such as improved efficiency, flexibility, and creativity. They reduce the file size and loading time of web pages and applications, as you only need one font file instead of multiple ones. This also saves storage space and bandwidth.

Variable fonts work by using a single font file that contains all the possible variations of the glyphs, instead of multiple files for each variation. This reduces the file size and the number of requests, which can improve the performance and loading time of the font.

Variable fonts—officially known as OpenType Font Variations—remove the explicit distinctions between different weights and styles, which have existed since the early days of typesetting. It's no exaggeration to say that this represents a huge leap forward in font technology in recent years.

Helvetica is a 'Grotesque' sans serif typeface. It was created in the 1950s to meet the demand for sans serif typefaces in the tradition of the International Style of graphic design. Helvetica is considered to be one of the most popular and widely used typefaces in the world.

A variable font (VF) is a font file that is able to store a continuous range of design variants. An entire typeface (font family) can be stored in such a file, with an infinite number of fonts available to be sampled.

Helvetica is an immensely popular sans serif font that's been around since 1957. Its clean modern simplicity made it a go-to choice for designers, and the font was soon seen everywhere.