In praise of Helvetica Neue
“Chairs blow my mind. You ever look at one and wonder why it has four legs? Or who decides how tall they should be, or why some have solid backs and others ornate cut aways or spindles? There was a point in human history when someone made those choices. Why?”
One day in 6th form I looked around at the five different designs of chairs in the common room and reverse engineered chairs. I was sitting with Phelpsy, Jack and Stu. They all looked at me like I was mad, then laughed and asked who thinks about those kind of things.
This is how I think of everything, and how I process data. And everything in the world is data.
There are certain things however that catch in my brain and live their. Flags are one, but I'm a big fan of typefaces too. Not so much in the pretty ones, but the high utility ones.
Helvetica Neue is a beautiful font. Because it's sans serif (it doesn't have hats and feet on the characters) and the kerning (distance between the characters) is just about perfect, it's super easy to read.
Verdana, Georgia and Tahoma are all great fonts, but are either designed for smaller screens, digital first or have more awkward kerning or the heights of letters are a little less uniform, and so lack the general utility.
I've tried for years to avoid using helvetica neue though, as it's the font of millennials. It's Vampire Weekend and Virgil Abloh, the font used in image memes and creative agency cred decks. It's been oversubscribed for half of my life.
But I've made peace with that and started using it again. Why? Because so many have started using fonts that are less accessible.
The same is true of Comic Sans, the typeface I've used for headers. It's universally easy to read and the vast majority actually like it.
And as much as I love putting limitations and constraints on my own work, because it forces you to get creative, I'd rather make sure people weren't pained to read my thoughts. Which is why this site is in HN and Comic Sans, the two easiest to read fonts currently known to man.
Have you ever considered how accessible your fonts are?
