Bauldoff linked to some scans he’d done of the 1980 promo for the typeface Haas Unica, by Team’77. I’d seen a copy of this back in the 90s but then forgot about it until seeing these scans — back then I was only a callow youth so the idea of improving Helvetica didn’t seem so remarkable or interesting as it does now. There’s a PDF here, if you’re interested.

Essentially, Haas Unica came about as a result of analysing the original version of Helvetica, its variants (as they were in 1980) and similar faces and seeking to improve them — to produce the ultimate archetypal sans serif face. A single face to unite them all, if you like. Looking at the comparitive settings of both faces at text size shows how subtle the differences are, with a detail closeup first:

You can get an idea of the kind of analysis they did from this little snippet:

The character width of Haas Helvetica appears to us to be generally somewhat narrow, so that the rhythm of the typeface is rather uneasy in its effect. The same applies to Akzidenz Book. Linotype Helvetica is wider than the Haas version in relation to its character area and appears to us to be generally more balanced. Its character width corresponds basically to that of Univers.

And the results, based on improvements and adjustments to the stroke thicknesses, relationships of the capital letter widths, numerals and the basic forms of the letters:

The differentiation of capital letter widths leads to a tighter rhythm in upper case composition. A slightly more open form in the Haas Unica specimen setting, compared with the original version, together with the individual corrections to characters, improves the readability of the typeface, especially for continuous text.

Unfortunately when the face was released there were some legal problems as Linotype and Scangraphic both claim ownership. As a result it is no longer available commercially, which is a huge shame. Perhaps a petition for the conflicting parties to get over themselves and perhaps release the face jointly? I mean, making some money from it is surely better than making none at all — especially when ‘ownership’ is being judged from contract and the shifting seas of corporate ownership. Meanwhile, some people are taking matters into their own hands by redrawing the letterforms for their own use.

On the left is the original Haas Helvetica, on the right the new Haas Unica, and in between some transitory and experimental forms.

Update: If you’d like to see some examples of Haas Unica actually in use, Richard at Gentle Pure Space provided a link to these photos. I agree with him on the lowercase ‘a’, it is very cute.

A few years ago I worked on the UI design of an online government-backed TEFL learning programme, which had a lot of input from various charities and education experts. One of the earliest inputs regarded the typeface to use for it. I remember an argument I had with a consultant for a large charity, who argued that Verdana was inherently an illegible face because the ascenders and capitals were different heights; an odd approach to take as I’m fairly sure that enough research had already been done into word shape and readability (by her own organisation as it turns out) to encourage faces with different ascender and cap-heights. Still, the argument quickly ended when the main stakeholder (other than the government) decreed that Comic Sans was the most readable text ‘face’ available and that it must be used for everything. They would allow no dissent. Fortunately a few months down the line and a couple of review stages later, we ended up dropping Comic Sans in favour of Arial — not normally a face to make designers rejoice, but so much of an improvement it felt like a liberation from purgatory. One of the main official objections to Comic Sans was that the letterforms were different from those end-users would be used to, and therefore unfamiliar and hard to recognise. Of course there were many unofficial objections, often centered around the end-users feeling somewhat insulted by such a childish face.

Anyway, I was reminded of all this when David pointed me towards the new face produced by Fontsmith for Mencap, which was actually designed in collaboration with end-users, and benefits greatly as a result. From the press release:

Having narrowed the choice down to a cleaner and more crisp letterform, which avoided the pitfalls of being too childlike and patronising, Fontsmith refined the design to aid legibility and maximise accessibility.

FS Mencap is not quirky or odd looking, doesn’t resemble the childlike design of fridge magnets or early learning tools and is set to challenge Arial as a new standard in legibility.

So rather than to treat people with learning or sight disabilities (or those who just don’t know English) as big children, Fontsmith and Mencap created a face that is clean, professional and adult, while still being friendly and (of course) legible. According to the Typophile article, the face will be available for the public to use too, which is excellent news. I wonder what range of characters are included in it though? The press release shows only basic Latin characters in the examples, but I hope it has broader coverage.

Part of my job involves developing websites in multiple languages, and earlier this week the decision was made to produce an arabic version of a particular very flash-heavy website we did. It’s going to be an interesting challenge, as the website in question is one of those that emulates the action of turning pages in a book (needless to say it’s a pure marketing ‘teaser’ style website) and so the entire site will need to be reconfigured to right-to-left reading and page turning. Anyway, those are fairly straightforward technical details and shouldn’t take too long. What really occupies my time is selecting a new typeface for the site — we use Arno Pro for its wide range of language support, especially Cyrillic and Greek, and so the new arabic face should work well with it. And lo, just this evening I find Palatino Arabic in the Type Director’s Club 2008 winning entries. Perfect.

Zapfino, feeling special.

I like drawing the ampersand. It’s the character that when you’re designing a typeface seemingly gives you the greatest artistic freedom. It’s big and swooshy, with lots of room for playing with curves, swirls and if you’re feeling special, lots of fine, delicate lines. But why? Why does this, and no other character, allow so much freedom? Well, the ampersand is hardly ever used in body text any more. It used to be — Gill used it frequently to adjust line length* when setting text — but modern usage has it pretty much limited to combining pronouns in titles, company names and credits. So when we design an ampersand, we can design it with a general assumption that it’ll be used in display sizes and weights, and we can fill it with beautiful refinements and detail, knowing that any uses at body sizes will be rare enough not to be a serious problem. Well, perhaps. There are plenty of typographers who feel that the ampersand should again be used in English as a legitimate replacement for the word ‘and’, and mourn the demise of it in common use. After all, until relatively recently the English language was considered to have 27 characters in its alphabet, with the ampersand right after z. A good thread to read on the topic is here.

Logos for E&A, Victoria and Albert Museum, Herb Lubalin’s ampersand and Mother & Child Logo and ampersands from Goudy Old Style, Hoefler Text Italic and Bell MT Italic.

* This seems to be the reason, though I by no means have an exhaustive knowledge of Gill’s work.

Another great link via Ace Jet 170, this article on the Font Feed about lining, tabular and old-style figures. I’m a fan of old-style figures anyway, and prefer to use them in most of my work as I find them much more readable, even for numerical data. Still, I suspect I’m somewhat disnumerate, so having the extra ‘word shape’ provided by old style numerals is going to be helpful for readability. I was also raised at a time when maths books were also set with old-style, and somewhat contrary to the example in the Font Feed example, so were most recipes I saw.

Pilcrow symbols from Helvetica and Palatino

Favourite to draw that is… Two interesting articles I’ve followed links to on the H&FJ site recently are the ones about the Sulzbacher Eszett and the Pilcrow (and Capitulum) (via Kottke and Ace Jet 170). It seems both come up in people’s favourite characters to draw. I like drawing the ‘3’ myself, both in ink and with beziers, but drawing the eszett is like a super big extra special bonus ‘3’ with soft curves, sharp edges, stressed strokes… lovely. Some people I work with have eszetts in their surnames, and it disappoints me that after a few months of blank incomprehension from some of the less linguistically capable* they replace it with a double-s. A real shame.

Office doodles testify to the popularity of the letter R, perhaps because it synopsizes the rest of the alphabet in one convenient package (it’s got a stem, a bowl, serifs both internal and external, and of course that marvelous signature gesture, the tail.)

I think I’ll chime in with Kottke and ask to see some of these office doodles!

* I’m ashamed to say this can be summed up as, “mostly British people”.

I’m feeling pretty glad right now that I have the perfect project where I can use this new script face. It’s an astonishingly complete script, with 4280 glyphs in each weight, covering Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. I don’t know of any other script that comes close. I work on projects where the work is localised into many European languages, often including Greek and Russian, so having typefaces and type systems that work for all of them makes life a hell of a lot easier. We make heavy use of Arno Pro nowadays for that very reason, but I was thinking we needed a script face to back it up on this particular project. I think Champion Script Pro fulfils that role perfectly. The “making of” blog post is fascinating, as is the set of examples on the Parachute site itself. I’ve nabbed a few examples for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic as a taster. Beautiful: