Helvetica Alternatives

In 1983, D. Stempel AG redesigned the famous Helvetica typeface for the digital age, creating Neue Helvetica for Linotype: a... Read More

Folio® was designed by Konrad F. Bauer and Walter Baum, and released in several weights and widths by the Bauer Type Foundry from 1956 to 1963. This legible sans serif family was designed around the same time as Helvetica, and in many ways it is quite similar to Helvetica. There are some notable differences in certain characters, like the lowercase a, and the caps G and Q. The designers of... Read More

The family that became FF Meta was first called PT55, an economical typeface made for easy reading at small sizes created for the West... Read More

On the way back to the airport from the 1994 ATypI conference in San Francisco, Albert-Jan Pool... Read More

“Schulbuch” is German for “school book.” This series of small type families named after regions in Germany shows geographic nuance: FF Schulbuch Nord for northern Germany, FF Schulbuch Süd for southern Germany, and FF Schulbuch Bayern for the state of Bavaria. Each of the three includes Regular and Bold weights. The typefaces themselves were drawn by Just van Rossum. The letterforms are based... Read More

FF Fago is the quintessential corporate typeface, a result of many years of work within the challenges and requirements of complex... Read More

The aim with this enhancement of Hans Reichel’s mega-popular FF Dax typeface was to balance the contrast so that the letters would work... Read More

The Slate typeface family melds superb functionality and aesthetic elegance into a remarkable communications tool. Few typefaces possess the beauty and power of this design.Slate is the work of Rod McDonald, an award-winning typeface designer and lettering artist. At one point in his forty-year career, McDonald participated in a typeface legibility and readability research project conducted by... Read More

Albany, from Monotype Imaging, is a typeface family whose fonts have the same metrics as Arial. However, in contrast to Arial or Helvetica, Albany's letterforms are more open, with more generous apertures and counters. Also, punctuation is not square, as in Arial, but round

FF Kievit explores the synthesis of the sans serif form to the structure and proportions of a traditional Renaissance Roman such as... Read More

Basic Commercial is a font based on historical designs from the hot metal typeface era. It first appeared around 1900, and was created by... Read More

Similar in design to Franklin Gothic, News Gothic was one of a number of sans serif faces manufactured by American Type Founders in the early years of the twentieth century. Initially cut as a light sans, heavier versions were made in the 1940s and 50s along with some condensed weights. The News Gothic font family offers an uncomplicated design that is well suited for use in newspapers and... Read More

The impetus behind Felbridge was both ambitious and highly practical: to develop an ideal "online" typeface for use in web pages and electronic media. Robin Nicholas, the family's designer, explains, "I wanted a straightforward sans serif with strong, clear letterforms which would not degrade when viewed in low resolution environments." Not surprisingly, the design also performs exceptionally... Read More

Twentieth Century was designed and drawn by Sol Hess in the Lanston Monotype drawing office between 1936 and 1947. The first weights were added to the Monotype typeface library in 1959. Twentieth Century is based on geometric shapes which originated in Germany in the early 1920's and became an integral part of the Bauhaus movement of that time. Form and function became the key words,... Read More

Helvetica is one of the most famous and popular typefaces in the world. It lends an air of lucid efficiency to any typographic message with its clean, no-nonsense shapes. The original typeface was called Neue Haas Grotesk, and was designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger for the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) in Switzerland. In 1960 the name was changed to Helvetica (an adaptation of... Read More