Die Grotesk design information

Graphic designers love Helvetica. Type designers hate it. Both are broad generalisations but I’m taking it as gospel. I’ve been around the traps for a couple of decades; it’s pretty much the attitude I encounter time and time again. I myself vacillated for 20 years between “detesting” Helvetica “ because of its authority” and “everything set in [it] is saying exactly the same thing”, to admiring Experimental Jetset’s longstanding dedication to their “mother tongue”.

I trained as a graphic designer in the early 2000s. This was post-modernism’s twilight. Emigre was god, CMYK was the word, and deconstruction was the bible. Print wasn’t yet crucified and the five horsemen of the digital apocalypse were soon to thunder through our screens and dopamine receptors. Even though it was on the coveted CD-R’s of pirated fonts, we didn’t use Helvetica. Not that we weren’t allowed to, it just wasn’t the done thing. Unless you were aping TDR, making faux rave flyers, or copying the techno-Japanese aesthetic from IdN™ Magazine, you didn’t touch it. I remember only one guy in the year below using Helvetica for his student project. He used it well, deploying a cool, clear, Saville-infused minimalism. He was also cool, ahead of the curve as some young people are. As it goes, he indadvertedly anticipated the post post-modernism modernism that kicked off a few years later. The trend that started as a grunge palate-cleanser ended up being the global banquet we’re still gorging on.

For a brief moment, we thought it would be post-modernism and print forever. We’d finally smash the grid. We’d all be poetic art-designers making free-wheeling typography that defied clear meaning, slipping through the subconscious like an eel. We were going to make graphic design like David Lynch made films.

Scrolling on my black mirror two decades later I’m told Lynch has died. While reflecting on his sublime normcore weirdness, a feed vomited up an infuriating article about some AI music CEO mewling, “the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music”. I texted the article to my good mate Duncan, who replied:

Now, Duncan is a very good designer. He spent a long time getting good. In the late 2000s, he made excellent typography with Helvetica. Meanwhile, I was fumbling about with béziers in FontLab, desperately convincing myself Helvetica isn’t good. Convincing myself that it was, in fact, terrible. It stood for everything wrong with typographic legibility and readability. At least that’s what all the dudes on typophile.com¹ said over and over ad infinitum across hundreds of threads. In my belief, I staked a whole typeface standing against Helvetica, on being everything that it isn’t. When you’re cutting your teeth you have to hone your knife against something.

I don’t know exactly when I started to appreciate Helvetica. I really like making typefaces. I get enormous satisfaction out of the process. I enjoy the time it takes. But that’s only really part of it. The fulfilling aspect is seeing my fonts actually being used. My fonts feel useless if they sit unused. The life cycle of a font is only complete when it is put to use. If I paid attention and didn’t have such silly, strong opinions about Helvetica, I would have understood how and why designers like Duncan were using Helvetica. Instead I flirted with it making Calibre, Untitled Sans, and Söhne. I even slipped Helvetica’s weight and spacing into Founders Grotesk. Which turned out alright in the end — it’s still one of my bestsellers 12 years later.

I don’t know why many type designers publicly dislike Helvetica. Maybe it’s like musicians hating The Beatles or chefs expressing disgust at McDonald’s. When you’re in the game, working in the shadow of a decades-old beast is daunting. Something so big, so popular, something so desirable people actually pay good money for it.

Something so fucking good it becomes the air that surrounds us.

That sort of typeface is intimidating. It’s not the peak of our craft but it’s damn close. Helvetica’s power is its symbiotic relationship with modernism, corporate identity, graphic design, and relative ease of use. It just looks good. Masters like Massimo Vignelli provided archetypes and methods of constructing words and logos that remain attractive and authoritative. He understood the graphic power of tight-but-not-touching spacing. He sliced those sidebearings until the words seemed inevitable and effortless. It takes a lot of time and experience to have that aesthetic judgment, especially with the tools and materials he used.

Die Grotesk is Klim’s first public variable font. We’ve made VF’s for a couple other clients. Now that we’ve moved our production and engineering process to GitHub, fontmake, and Designspace, they’re a bit easier to make. I was skeptical of VFs during their 2016 public announcement at ATypI in Warsaw. I remain skeptical as they’re still extremely brittle and relatively poorly supported. The functional use-case is reasonable — i.e., saving a bit of space or bandwidth or whatever for websites.² I appreciate the efforts of developers who derive great satisfaction from trimming the digital fat and optimising their sites. It’s craft. But I’m not making fonts as interim stopgaps until actual solutions arrive. I’m making fonts for designers to use and enjoy.

From my observations, designers get enormous pleasure locking up logos and headlines just so. Die Grotesk makes that easier, more predictable, and consistent. Like the original metal cuts of Neue Haas Grotesk, Die Grotesk is designed for perfect typographic texture across all sizes. To this end, Die Grotesk has a slider that controls the letter spacing. It’s technically the Optical Size axis (opsz). The larger the letters need to be, the bigger the number on the slider. The slider scale indicates intended point size: 6 = 6pt, 42 = 42pt.³ With any luck this will save designers mucking about with negative tracking values, which is a crude way of getting tight spacing and rarely reflects the desired finish in a lockup. Channelling Vignelli, I spaced and kerned Die Grotesk D cuts for headlines and logotypes, perfecting each letter combination for one or two words rather than blocks of continuous text.

Helvetica was canonised through large size use: headlines, logos, poster typography, etc. Conspicuously absent is small text settings. Back in the old days of hand-set metal type, Helvetica’s text sizes were wonderful. It’s hard to appreciate text typesetting in a reproduction. Display typography is performative — it’s easier to convey through reproductions. Text typography has different functional remit. It needs to be experienced at a 1:1 scale. This is what my old anti-Helvetica sentiment misses. It was predicated on digital font text setting. My prejudice lingered until I got actual Haas specimens with 8, 9, 10 pt text settings. It suddenly dawned on me how fucking good it actually is. The grey value of the texture is solid and sublime. This is what I’ve tried to capture in Die Grotesk’s A cuts — functional and sympathetic spacing for small text sizes.

Helvetica is endearing and infuriating because it’s simultaneously banal and sublime. Its plain letterforms, now, seem so obvious. It’s hard to imagine what could be added or subtracted to make it better. Helvetica came about through painstaking skill and craft and observation. Unlike AI prompting, it took a long time to make. Max Miedinger was a graphic artist and font salesman for Haas. He knew what designers were buying and using. His keen eye, coupled with Eduard Hoffmann’s good timing made all the difference.

Helvetica’s design process fundamentally relied upon Akzidenz-Grotesk — a popular competitor’s typeface. At each stage of production, Miedinger & Hoffman compared and contrasted to Akzidenz-Grotesk: weight, spacing, texture, finish. These days, no type designer would dare admit to copying and improving upon a competing typeface, even though some modern fonts wear their contemporary influence on their sleeve. Hoffman wasn’t ‘solving’ a typographic problem or making a ‘tool’. He wasn’t trying to make some historical homage, respectfully assuming his place in the long line of typographic ancestors. He was ruthlessly making and marketing something new based on something popular.

Perhaps this is what annoys many of my contemporaries about Helvetica — that it’s nakedly commercial, really good, and bloody successful? Nobody making fonts these days will openly admit, “I made this font for purely commercial reasons.” It’s just not cricket. Of course we all want commercial success, or at least fair compensation for our mahi.⁴ We frame our releases with history and research and carefully avoid revealing our true feelings about why we make fonts. Because every creative endeavour has a small part of your soul and spirit, it would be too vulnerable and unbearable to admit the real cost and fear involved in making something new and offering it up to the world, to our customers and savage imaginary contempt of our peers.

For many years, I’ve written interminable long-form essays about my new typefaces. I usually tell people — and myself — that I write for me, 20 years ago. I explain my design decisions how the typeface came to be. I lay bare all the things I wanted to know when I was green, questions I had for then-contemporary typeface designers. But I also wrote to justify their existence, to prove to imaginary international peers that yes, I know what I’m doing.⁵ I’m trying just as hard as you even though I am stuck on a rock in the middle of the Pacific with no access to your great archives and libraries and too intimidated to even contemplate applying for ECAL or TypeMedia or Reading.

Helvetica elicits a similar, longstanding discomfort within me. Who the fuck am I, sitting outside of the great European tradition and typographic lineages, to make it anew? I didn’t grow up surrounded by masterful modernist work. I grew up in the sparse provinces of a far-flung colony stuck in the death-knell of cultural cringe,⁶ surrounded by peeling vinyl signage made from the compromised, first-generation digital fonts twice-removed from metal originals. This was my experience of Helvetica (and many other famous types), one of the first four stalwarts of the digital font revolution sitting beside Times, Courier, and Symbol. Helvetica wasn’t high-brow, it was just… there. Unmoored from its modernist foundations, it drifted towards the colonies. Used merely because it could be used, its default availability rendered it ubiquitous, forming the typographic air I breathed.

Just last night, for instance, Duncan and Elaina joined me at the beach for dinner. We had fish & chips, a classic takeaway staple here in Aotearoa. Waikanae Beach Takeaways is a busy, humble, family operation. Painted breeze-block, plastic stacking chairs, wood veneer and formica counter, and a menu board with nothing but the staples. It’s typeset in tightly-spaced Helvetica caps. The whole place could have existed verbatim in my childhood and will probably remain so for the next decade. Our three scoops, two fish, and one burger went down a treat. When I was a kid, greasies were wrapped in the newspaper. Not anymore. Our chips didn’t taste the same wrapped in newsprint. I felt the quiet nostalgic typographic loss.

Nostalgia is a powerful emotional force. Recently I’ve been rediscovering 90s music. Apart from being the best decade for metal, the 90s was a time when artists — specifically musicians — struggled with and pushed back against rampant exploitation, commercialisation and corporatisation. These were my teenage years, a defining time for any young person. The prevailing sentiment seemed so plain and obvious: fuck the man, don’t sell out. Make your own shit, control the distribution. I just assumed these were the fundamental tenets of running a creative practice. To ‘sell out’ was the worst thing you could do. But it wasn’t clear what ‘selling out’ actually meant, and certainly didn’t leave any nuance or grey area on the spectrum between creative integrity and moral bankruptcy.

During an extended kōrerorero with my mate Reuben, we reminisced about the differences between the 90s and now. He reckons selling out as hard and fast as possible is the name of the game these days. Make something, get famous, get money. Move fast, break things. Rinse and repeat.⁷ If making money is the only goal, just be honest and get into crypto⁸ or real estate or whatever. Maybe that’s what fuelled the creative/money/sellout tension of the 90s. Does financial success from pursuing a creative practice erode integrity, resulting in a de facto selling out?

Within the type design world, making anything like Helvetica (or even a neo-grotesk) lacks integrity and feels like selling out. Because it’s so popular, so known, even making something close is creative bankruptcy. You’ve run out of ideas and are just trying to make money. Your greasy fingers are desperately grasping at something established because it’s the easy option. And, by Christ, we should make fonts the hard way. Just like Garamond did.

Many modern type foundries have a sense of craft and tradition. We’re mindful of our history, collectively bearing the weight of tradition. We see ourselves as collegial, but independent, craftspeople. We’re not like musicians in a particular genre, all happy to to be labelled punk and playing sets in dive bars. Foundries rarely work exclusively within a single genre. No foundry, for example, dedicates themselves to making only humanist sans serifs or 18th century blackletter revivals.⁹ We’re like record labels, expected to have a catalogue. We’re extreme specialists, modern artisans, crafting original fonts across multiple genres, supporting multiple scripts, using the latest technology, ensuring our fonts work seamlessly across 30 years of digital platforms, apps, software environments, and operating systems, all while running our own 24/7 sales and marketing and support and — for fuck’s sake — never selling out.

These days it’s Monotype, a handful of resellers, and a few hundred small foundries selling fonts. In 90s terminology, Monotype is ‘the man’. They own so much, including the once-indie darlings FontShop, MyFonts and Hoefler&Co.¹⁰ Making fonts is hard enough. Most of us are good at the making part but struggle with graphic design, distribution, licensing, and marketing. The craft world in general struggles with the idea of selling and selling out — surely the quality of the work should be be enough? Surely, but no. That’s not how it works.

MyFonts used to be an excellent platform for type designers to sell their fonts. The royalty rate was 80% in favour of the designer. Now it’s 20% if you’re lucky and you’re thrown in with a quarter of a million competing fonts being promoted by God-knows-what shady algorithm driven by opaque C-suite imperatives and subject to shitty terms and conditions. Ages ago, a MyFonts guy said I should join because the customer base was huge and sales were great. I declined. Back then, I was arrogant enough to think being shoved into a massive database of fonts would dilute and obfuscate my own work. You don’t see Prada in K-Mart, right? I no longer have this attitude, but I am grateful my conceit kept me away from the legal and ethical clusterfuck the platform has become.¹¹

Isn’t it curious that the perennial top sellers on MyFonts are actually Monotype-owned IP? I mean, good on them for rapaciously buying up all the classic fonts, the ones made famous by graphic designers. They also revive and re-issue some of the big ones, Helvetica included. On one hand, buying the big names allows you to capitalise on the fonts designers know and love. For Monotype, this means aggressive discounting at the front end and harpooning the corporate whales into their annual subscription dragnets. An excellent sales tactic for a bloody-minded corporation hell-bent on repaying their debt.

On the other hand, perhaps you also have a duty of care for the fonts you inherit and acquire. If you’re gonna assume responsibility for a catalogue with such significant cultural history, you better come correct.

Compared to the original metal, I don’t like Helvetica®, Neue Helvetica®, or Helvetica Now®. It’s simply a matter of aesthetic taste and preference. They’re serviceable neo-grotesks, but they’re not ‘Helvetica’. I like Neue Haas Grotesk. Antique Legacy seems faithful and respectful. But what I mostly like is how Helvetica is used by the best designers. I think of it as the first “graphic designer’s typeface”. I love that it exists comfortably in high and low culture. I like how it gets used thoughtlessly by people just needing a sign or bumper sticker or junk mail flyer. Helvetica is famously and erroneously called neutral. This usually means that it’s aesthetically and culturally neutral. As untrue as this is, Helvetica is functionally neutral. Since its elevation to high modernism and subsequent deprecation to laminated motel rate cards, Helvetica has maintained a functional neutrality: it belongs and thrives in all of these spaces.

Today I’m sitting at Southward Distilling finishing this interminable essay. They use Mānuka for their identity. It’s on the doormat. Nobody knows this except me (probably). People literally wipe their feet on my letters! What an absolute privilege to be so invisibly embedded into Aotearoa’s visual landscape. It’s what I dreamed of 20 years ago when I started Klim and hated Helvetica.

And yet, the question remains: why have another go at Helvetica? The truth is I’m arrogant enough to think I can make something good, and angry that the trademark holders squander the design. I’m realistic enough to know my sales will not make a dent in the man’s bottom line. I’m old enough to know the line between creative integrity and selling out is extremely blurry. I’m thirsty enough to want designers to buy and use my fonts. And, after 20 hard years of drawing letters, I am now confident enough in my ability because I have never been afraid to spend the actual time getting good.

It seems easy having a go at the most popular font. It’s actually really fucking hard to exhale two decades of stale breath and re-draw the typographic air that surrounds us.