(.)īook designers have long had access to great serif fonts dripping with character that were ideal for setting long passages of text.

Enjoying Acumin is like developing a taste for exceptionally good water. Reading about the design challenges Slimbach set himself (and met) helps you appreciate this new type system, whose virtues are initially all too easy to overlook, because Acumin so successfully avoids bringing a personality to the table. And I couldn’t agree more with his observations: Jeffrey Zeldman has high praise for Acumin. Neutral is amazing, but Acumin’s much larger family was very appealing.Īfter devouring Acumin's wonderful microsite, I did a bit more digging and came across a post by a familiar face. This eventually led me to Neutral (duh!) and back to Acumin. I was looking for a less ‘trendy’ and overused version of Helvetica. Once I ruled out the ‘too cool’ and ‘too playful’ types, I was left with something in the middle, something quite neutral. What makes them so friendly and a bit quirky gets in the way when reading long passages of texts, in my opinion. In contrast, Atlas and Post Grotesk are beautifully human and amiable, yet I simply didn’t enjoy them as text fonts. Both of those typefaces can feel a bit too modern and cold. This meant that I either had to cut down on content, reduce the font size or add more pages – neither of which was an easy thing to do.

Some testing showed that Suisse and Aktiv Grotesk just ran a little too wide in body sizes. On my initial shortlist was Suisse International, Aktiv Grotesk, Atlas, and Post Grotesk. And so after a lot of research, these were the typefaces I set out to test: Not that I dislike Adobe in any way, but as a tiny brand I know that every paying customer can make a big difference.

Acumin was commissioned by Adobe, another reason why I didn’t really pay much attention to it. When I buy new things I’m usually rooting for the underdog, so I was eager to support smaller foundries. I love going through the websites of type foundries to explore the stupendous amount of work that goes into designing typefaces. It doesn’t really make much of an effort to grab your attention or sell itself. It’s a pretty ‘straight-faced’ sans-serif type with few characteristics that stand out. In a way, Acumin is spectacularly unspectacular. Perhaps that’s why, when I came across Acumin, it didn’t trigger any particular reaction at first. For example, the unique shape if the lowercase ‘a’ in Calibre, the curve in Circular’s lowercase ‘t’ or that prominent crossbar of Walsheim’s capital ‘G’.

Most typefaces contain a few distinct letters that give it away quite quickly. I want it to feel as calm as reading a book and as personal and authentic as going through someone’s photo album. The goal is to further reduce and simplify, to create a placid reading experience accompanied by unpolished, real-life photography. This is where the redesign of Offscreen is headed. Going through the editorial design inspiration that I’ve been collecting for a couple of years now, you can see that I like mainly type-driven spreads, using only a few simple elements combined with one or two (often subdued) colours. First up: my decision-making process for settling on Offscreen’s new typeface, Acumin. I’ve made some updates to these emails to adapt them to the blog’s open format. These emails went out to backers of my fundraiser every Sunday between August 2016 and March 2017. Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing a selection of my Rebranding Diary emails.

Neue haas grotesk text pro adobe