I quote the Pfizer website:Ī clean, open typeface for a global future Noto as used in the recent rebranding of Pfizer – quite a significant and impactful company in our times, to say the least – is a good example of how the value of type is perceived and who eventually received all the kudos. The thing is that the type process of Roboto was anything but sacred, it was a work-in-progress and for the next round, in 2014, Google developed an improved and more accepted version of Roboto. First appearing in 2011, it was depicted by type critic and type curator Stephen Coles as a “Frankenfont” borrowing from Helvetica, Univers, Myriad, FF Din among others. Iconic typefaces are not that important in this new context. In that scheme type is only a part of this digital experience. Google on the other end is the gateway to a web and mobile-first digital experience. But Arial and Helvetica are not the same typeface, Arial seems to be a kind of displacement of Helvetica, sharing mostly the same metrics but borrowing its shape from something much older.
Linotype was eventually acquired by Monotype in 2006, so both Arial and Helvetica are Monotype assets now. Monotype was saved from bankruptcy by making Arial for Microsoft, preventing the latter from paying huge royalties for Helvetica, then a Linotype asset. Since Monotype bought Ascender Corporation in 2010 and since Google owns Android, we can say that these assets form a kind of typographic joint venture between Monotype and Google, which is somehow odd because Monotype and Google do not share the same interest in type.
Droid fonts would become the foundation of Open Sans and Noto typefaces, major assets of a “new normal” digital font landscape. Five years earlier, Google had bought Android, and in 2007-2008, the Droid fonts (designed by Steve Matesson of Ascender Corporation) were released. Made possible by the CSS property in 2008, web fonts were boosted by the uprising of Google Fonts, which first appeared in 2010. How ironic! And then Calibri with its rounded shapes, which once meant the demise of a Pakistani former Prime Minister, so popular in fact that Microsoft resorted to organising a contest to supersede it.Įnough with the office comedy. Once a breakthrough, now an ordinary, bland typeface. Of course there is also Times New Roman, first born in 1931 for a newspaper but then adapted for office clerks. We could envision a strange but sincere recent history of digital type through similar fonts, substitutes, tributes, surrogates etc, but also unexpected successes like Comic Sans, which never disappointed normal people.
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