Few of those characteristics demanded more attention than the spacing - or to use the typographical term, the kerning. The development of Helvetica Now also necessitated a close look at all the versions of Helvetica so far developed (the most notable major revision being Neue Helvetica, released in 1983) and adapting their best characteristics for an age of screens. “They had identified a short laundry list of things that would be better.” What shortcomings they found arose from the fact that the font had been designed for an analog age of optical printing, and “when we went digital, a lot of that nuance of optical sizing sort of washed away.” Ultimately, the project was less about updating Helvetica than restoring characters lost in its adaptation to digital, including “the straight-legged capital ‘R,’ single-story lowercase ‘a,’ lowercase ‘u’ without a trailing serif, a lowercase ‘t’ without a tailing stroke on the bottom right, a beardless ‘g,’ some rounded punctuation.” “Four years ago, our German office kicking around the idea of creating a new version of Helvetica,” Charles Nix, type director at Helvetica-rights-holder Monotype tells The Verge. But as times change, so must even near-perfect fonts: hence Helvetica Now.
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