Helvetica Neue Extended Font Download

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Likethe Swiss nation itself, designers loved its neutrality, making it almost infinitely adaptable for all kinds of projects. Some of the most recognisable uses of Helvetica have been on US tax forms, EU warnings on tobacco products, and in wordmarks, including American Airlines, BMW, Sears, Microsoft, Panasonic, Target and Verizon.

Helvetica has also been widely used in road and railway signage, from the UK and USA to Japan and South Korea. There's even been a popular film about it. And since the dawning of the digital age, it's been ubiquitous on software, apps and websites everywhere.

In the list below, we've brought together ten such alternatives. All of these provide the same clear, unfussy neutrality of Helvetica but with a different visual twist to help give your designs a more distinctive look.

Open Sans is a free, open-source, humanist sans serif, designed with an upright stress, open forms and a neutral yet friendly appearance. Created by Steve Matteson of Ascender Corp, it's been optimised for print, web, and mobile and has excellent legibility (it's especially wonderful in smaller sizes). The complete 897 character set includes Latin, Greek and Cyrillic character sets, and since 2021 it's been available as a variable font family.

Another free and open-source typeface, Inter, is a variable font designed for screens, featuring a tall x-height to aid in the readability of mixed-case and lower-case text. It also includes several OpenType features, including tabular numbers, contextual alternates that adjust punctuation depending on the shape of surrounding glyphs, and a slashed zero for when you need to distinguish zero from the letter O.

Published by Commercial Type, Stag is a super-family that originated as a slab serif commissioned by Esquire magazine for headlines. The sans-serif is eye-catching in headlines but not distracting at text sizes. By hitting the right balance between rounded and blunt terminals, it complements its serif sibling perfectly, giving the family as a whole a no-nonsense muscularity.

Work Sans is an open-source typeface loosely on early Grotesques and is simplified and optimised for screen resolutions. For example, diacritic marks are larger than how they'd be in print. The regular weights are optimised for on-screen text usage at medium sizes (14-48px), while those closer to the extreme weights are more suitable for display use. A version optimised for desktop applications is available from the Github project page.

Akzidenz-Grotesk translates into English as "working sans-serif", and it has a long pedigree. First published in 1898, the design originated from Royal Grotesk light by royal type-cutter Ferdinand Theinhardt. Its effortless simplicity led to its popularity taking hold in what became known as the post-war Swiss International Style, and Pentagram partner Domenic Lippa has described it as "probably the best typeface ever designed...it doesn't dominate when used, allowing the designer more freedom and versatility".

Avenir is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by iconic Swiss designer Adrian Frutiger in 1987. He designed it to be a more organic interpretation of the geometric style, more even in colour and suitable for extended text and later described it as his finest work. It translates from French as 'Future', suggesting that Futura was an influence. But unlike the latter, Avenir is not purely geometric; it has vertical strokes that are thicker than the horizontals, an 'o' that is not a perfect circle and shortened ascenders.

Arimo is a TrueType font family that looks surprisingly good in all sizes. It was designed by Steve Matteson as an innovative, refreshing sans-serif design that's metrically compatible with Arial. It offers great on-screen readability characteristics and the pan-European WGL character set and solves the needs of developers looking for width-compatible fonts to address document portability across platforms.

Univers is a neo-grotesque sans-serif designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1957. This supremely legible family comes in various weights and styles, even when combined, giving an impression of steadiness and homogeneity. With its sturdy, clean forms, Univers can facilitate an expression of cool elegance and rationality. It has an uncanny ability to combine well with fonts of many different styles and origins.

Proxima Nova combines modern proportions with a geometric appearance, bridging the gap between typefaces like Futura and Akzidenz Grotesk. Since the mid-2010s, it's become the most popular paid-for font on the web and is used on thousands of websites around the world. Proxima Nova is available in seven weights, each with matching italics as well as small caps styles and condensed and extra condensed widths. It goes well with many fonts, including Helvetica Neue, Adobe Garamond and Lucida Grande.

FF Bau is a large workhorse family of sans-serif Grotesk typefaces. They were designed by Christian Schwartz in 2002 as a revival of the Grotesk types cast by the Schelter & Giesecke foundry in Leipzig in the 19th century, which were popular at the Bauhaus in the mid-1920s. This latest version updates the family without rationalising away the spirit and warmth of the original. FF Bau is available in eight weights with matching italics and supports 83 languages.

Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the famous 19th-century (1890s) typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk and other German and Swiss designs.[2] Its use became a hallmark of the International Typographic Style that emerged from the work of Swiss designers in the 1950s and 1960s, becoming one of the most popular typefaces of the mid-20th century.[3] Over the years, a wide range of variants have been released in different weights, widths, and sizes, as well as matching designs for a range of non-Latin alphabets. Notable features of Helvetica as originally designed include a high x-height, the termination of strokes on horizontal or vertical lines and an unusually tight spacing between letters, which combine to give it a dense, solid appearance.

Developed by the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) of Mnchenstein (Basel), Switzerland, its release was planned to match a trend: a resurgence of interest in turn-of-the-century "grotesque" sans-serifs among European graphic designers, that also saw the release of Univers by Adrian Frutiger the same year.[4][5][6] Hoffmann was the president of the Haas Type Foundry, while Miedinger was a freelance graphic designer who had formerly worked as a Haas salesman and designer.[7]

Miedinger and Hoffmann set out to create a neutral typeface that had great clarity, had no intrinsic meaning in its form, and could be used on a wide variety of signage.[7] Originally named Neue Haas Grotesk (New Haas Grotesque), it was rapidly licensed by Linotype and renamed Helvetica in 1960, which in Latin means "Swiss", from Helvetia, capitalising on Switzerland's reputation as a centre of ultra-modern graphic design.[8] A feature-length film directed by Gary Hustwit was released in 2007 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the typeface's introduction in 1957.[9]

The first version of the typeface (which later became known as Helvetica) was created in 1957 by Swiss type designer Max Miedinger. His goal is to design a new sans serif font that can compete in the Swiss market, as a neutral font that should not be given any additional meaning. The main influence on Helvetica was Akzidenz-Grotesk from Berthold; Hoffman's scrapbook of proofs of the design shows careful comparison of test proofs with snippets of Akzidenz-Grotesk.[10] Its 'R' with a curved tail resembles Schelter-Grotesk, another turn-of-the-century sans-serif sold by Haas.[4][10][11] Wolfgang Homola comments that in Helvetica "the weight of the stems of the capitals and the lower case is better balanced" than in its influences.[12]

Attracting considerable attention on its release as Neue Haas Grotesk (Nouvelle Antique Haas in French-speaking countries),[a] Stempel and Linotype adopted Neue Haas Grotesk for release in hot metal composition, the standard typesetting method at the time for body text, and on the international market.[14]

In 1960, its name was changed by Haas' German parent company Stempel to Helvetica in order to make it more marketable internationally; it comes from the Latin name for the pre-Roman tribes of what became Switzerland. Intending to match the success of Univers, Arthur Ritzel of Stempel redesigned Neue Haas Grotesk into a larger family.[15][16] The design was popular: Paul Shaw suggests that Helvetica "began to muscle out" Akzidenz-Grotesk in New York City from around summer 1965, when Amsterdam Continental, which imported European typefaces, stopped pushing Akzidenz-Grotesk in its marketing and began to focus on Helvetica instead.[17][18] It was also made available for phototypesetting systems, as well as in other formats such as Letraset dry transfers[19] and plastic letters,[20] and many phototypesetting imitations and knock-offs were rapidly created by competing phototypesetting companies.[21][22]

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Linotype licensed Helvetica to Xerox, Adobe and Apple, guaranteeing its importance in digital printing by making it one of the core fonts of the PostScript page description language.[23][24] This led to a version being included on Macintosh computers and a clone compatible metrically, Arial, on Windows computers. The rights to Helvetica are now held by Monotype Imaging, which acquired Linotype; the Neue Haas Grotesk digitisation (discussed below) was co-released with Font Bureau.[4]

Like many neo-grotesque designs, Helvetica has narrow apertures, which limits its legibility onscreen and at small print sizes. It also has no visible difference between upper-case 'i' and lower-case 'L', although the number 1 is quite identifiable with its flag at top left.[26][27] Its tight, display-oriented spacing may also pose problems for legibility.[28] Other fonts intended for legibility at small sizes such as Verdana, Meta, Trebuchet, or a monospace font such as Courier, which makes all letters quite wide, may be more appropriate than Helvetica.

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