Putting the Grotesk back into Helvetica?

I can’t be the only one who noticed this, surely:

That’s from the mini-site, on Firefox. If they can’t get the WOFF right… And yes, it’s a very silly price.

Consider this: Helvetica is on billions of computers. And it is essentially free.

To differentiate, the *real* Helvetica should cost the inverse of free, e.g. infinite. The price quoted is cheap, thus.

Also kooky in Chrome.

The jaggedness (in larger sizes) is due to the lousy Cleartype rendering engine, but the misaligned v/i is clearly not hinted. Even the most basic autohinting would lock these to the same alignment zone.

@frodefrank

Again I learn something. The example text given by nemo looks genuinely terrible. Is that solely something that will happen on a computer using Windows? (I am inferring this from your reference to ClearType).

Yes. Cleartype has no aa in the y-direction, but utilizes the subpixels in the x-direction. Sharper then the old Standard rendering at text sizes, but horrible large. DirectWrite "corrects" this.

Why the quotes? Yes, not anti-aliasing in the y-axis was a mistake, but with that in place nothing beats it. And nothing is worse than treating intelligently hinted fonts like any other dumb font.

hhp

Does anybody have a good shot of the lowercase s? I swear the lefthand terminal is lower on it's leftside. It may just be because the lower half of the s curles outward a bit more than the top half.

Neue Haas Grotesk Display 55 Roman lowercase s, upper terminal:

lowercase s, lower terminal:

In the S, the lower hook is bigger than the top hook, and the lower terminal farther from the spine (as usual), so for some there may be an illusion that they are different in slant, even though they are not.

Check and mate. I resign.