How Typotheque designed a sans serif that outperformed Helvetica

For years, Peter Bilak kept noticing the same pattern. Some designers would passionately defend Helvetica as the best typeface ever made, while others would dismiss it as unusable. At first, the Founder & Principal Designer at Typotheque assumed this was taste – modernist versus anti-modernist, Swiss versus expressive. But when he looked more closely, he realised something more practical was going on. The people who loved Helvetica were often using it large – in headlines, signage and bold statements. The people who hated it were often using it small – in text sizes where clarity really matters. “Digital Helvetica, as it’s commonly used, is relatively tight and closed,” Bilak explains. “In small sizes that tight spacing and compact structure can make it feel cramped and harder to read. But those same qualities create a very controlled, predictable rhythm in large sizes, which is exactly why it works so well for headlines.” That observation became the foundation for Zed, Typotheque’s most ambitious project to date. Rather than designing another compromise – a display typeface that also has to work in text settings – the Netherlands-based foundry treated text and display as fundamentally separate design problems from the beginning.