Can a font make you cry? I mean, all it is is a typeface. It might be well designed, it might even be beautiful, but can it make you cry?
If such a font does exist, for me it might just be Neue Haas Grotesk. Just looking at it, it may not seem all that impressive. I mean, it’s basically Helvetica, a font that everyone knows even if they don’t know much about fonts. But to someone who cares about design, it’s oh so much more!
Neue Haas Grotesk is about history and attention to detail. Historically, letter spacings could be anything they needed to be. Advances in technology forced the spacings into discrete chunks. Even later digitization techniques once again removed the granularity, but until NHG, no one bothered to restore Helvetica to its former glory. And the attention to detail is incredible, like how certain numbers and punctuation marks have alternate versions to match with All-Caps mode. Or how there is an alternate version of the letter a with a slightly curved tail, just as an option for when it looks better!
All of this may seem excessive, but the results speak for themselves. The type is just so tight and perfect, everything looks so good!
The price, though, is an absolute killer. As much as I love this font, I don’t have $1000 to drop on a font. This is clearly a font for graphic designers only, which is a damned shame, because I wish fonts this perfect and complete could be made available to everyone. I have a feeling that if Steve Jobs were still alive today, considering his obsession with both typefaces and perfection, he might have licensed NHG for all future Apple platforms. Sadly, we’re probably just stuck with the (slightly) inferior Helvetica Neue instead. *Sigh*