FontFont Alternates To Neue Helvetica

FF Real was originally conceived by Erik Spiekermann as one text weight and one headline weight to be used as the only fonts in his biography ‘Hello I am Erik’, edited by Johannes Erler, and published in 2014. While Spiekermann drew the alphabets, he passed on the font data to Ralph du Carrois who cleaned it up and completed it. In the meantime FF Real has been extended to a family of two... Read More

On the way back to the airport from the 1994 ATypI conference in San Francisco, Albert-Jan Pool and Erik Spiekermann discussed Pool’s prospects, Spiekermann knowing that his friend’s employer had just gone out of business. He suggested that if Pool wanted to make some money in type design, that he take a closer... Read More

FF Celeste Sans is something of a hybrid, like its serif companion FF Celeste. Its designer Chris Burke describes it like this: “The serif version is a deliberate attempt to temper the modern face (Didone) type model with old face (Garalde) elements; to mix what Swiss letterform theorists have called the static and the dynamic principles of letter construction. Allowing for historical fancy,... Read More

FF Bau is a large workhorse family of sans serif typefaces drawn in the “Grotesk” genre. Christian Schwartz is its designer, working under the inspiration of Grotesk types cast by the Schelter & Giesecke foundry in Leipzig. Schelter & Giesecke sold these popular Grotesks for many decades; they were first introduced around 1880. When the Bauhaus moved nearby in Dessau in the mid-1920s, these... Read More

Matthew Carter’s Verdana was made for screen reading and works brilliantly within that medium. FF Basic Gothic is a response to Verdana in print, where its forms leave generous room for improvement. Influenced by the early sanses of the 19th century and developed for today’s print standards, FF Basic Gothic is a sans serif optimized for maximum legibility. With its functional, basic look, it is... Read More

A popular choice within the FontFont library, FF Clan is an extensive family from Polish designer Łukasz Dziedzic. A contemporary sans with modestly squared curves, FF Clan comprises seven weights across an astonishing six widths. Dziedzic’s strong, readable types feature a large x-height, short descenders, and small caps for all weights. The thin weight is delicate but impactful, ideal for... Read More

FF Good is a straight-sided sans serif in the American Gothic tradition, designed by Warsaw-based Łukasz Dziedzic. Despite having something of an “old-fashioned” heritage, FF Good feels new. Many customers agree: the sturdy, legible forms of FF Good have been put to good use in the Polish-language magazine ‘Komputer Swiat,’ the German and Russian edition of the celebrity tabloid OK!, and the... Read More

FF Kievit explores the synthesis of the sans serif form to the structure and proportions of a traditional Renaissance Roman such as Garamond or Granjon. Work began on the typeface in 1995 when Mike Abbink was a student at Art Center in California. The family spans nine weights and includes small caps, true italics, and multiple figure sets – everything necessary for creating sophisticated... 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 German Post Office in 1985. Erik Spiekermann later improved and expanded his design to include more weights and styles, and prepared its release as FF Meta, one of the first and truly foundational members of the early FontFont library. As desktop publishing... Read More

During designer Felix Braden’s search for an offline companion to the Verdana typeface, he set off on the development of a new series of types to fill the missing niche. In text, FF Scuba is a bit tighter and more compact than Verdana, which is exactly what one would expect from a typeface made for print media, rather than primarily on-screen reading. At small sizes, FF Scuba manages to blend... Read More