Welcome to the Tech Mem Ride Home for Monday, May 27,

I'm Brian McCullough.

Hope those of you that have one are enjoying your long weekend.

As promised, here's a sort of special bonus episode of the Tech Mem Right Home.

Nords and tech folk have always had a special fascination with typeface and font design and especially with the venerable Helvetica.

Today we're going to talk to Charles Nix, whose Foundry Monotype, had the challenge of updating Helvetica

for the 21st century with Helvetica now.

A lot of these bonus episodes are you learning along with me as we take deeper dives into certain tech topics.

Well, look, no more so than this episode because I knew absolutely nothing about this area of design going into it so I was fascinated

to learn about what goes into creating a typeface from an artistic design and

even business perspective and if you want to see for yourself what we're talking about here hit up the

link at the bottom of the show notes to see what Helvetica now looks like.

So as I sort of said off air, you know, I feel like type is some sort of

of weird hobby or obsession for tech folk and I'm no different I you know I've seen the Helvetica documentary

and and things like that and I feel like Helvetica is the most famous font in the world but at the same

time I don't really know anything about anything

and maybe some people listening don't as well so could we just start by you

giving us maybe a little history and background on you know where Helvetica came from and how it became so

ubiquitous in the world? Sure so if you really want a nerd out then this is

exactly where we need to begin.

The nerdiest of nerds talking about the nerdiest of topics.

So Halvedica is the sort of, it's sort of the end product of an evolution of sans-sariff typefaces and those are

...