
Smelvetica – Helvetica the way it was intended to be - lelf
http://tholman.com/smelvetica/
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bborud
Ever since seeing Sans Bullshit Sans
([http://www.sansbullshitsans.com/](http://www.sansbullshitsans.com/)) I've
always wanted to pull a font-related prank at the company where I work.

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21
Needs a blockchain & co update

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failrate
Oddly, it didn't censor "leveraging".

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wincy
It censors “leverage” though. It’s funny how universally “bullshit” these
terms are considered to be.

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metaphor
For those of us outside the graphic design bubble, the author's top-level
post[1] briefly explaining his madness.

[1] [http://tholman.com/post/smelvetica/](http://tholman.com/post/smelvetica/)

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phakding
I am a font snob and was about to leave a strongly worded comment for
suggesting this font. Your comment saved me for making a fool of myself.

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ecocentrik
The XKCD quote was a pretty good indication of the author's intent. I like it
and will be using it in place of comic sans for all my inter office punnery.
As much as I like graphic designers, the ability to give them an occasional
seizure is hard to pass up.

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DonHopkins
There should be a fixed with version of Smelvetica for programming, where each
character is artistically justified within the character cell.

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ecocentrik
The fun of this font is sharing it with others. Fixed width fonts are mostly
used in personal/personalizable settings.

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zanchey
If you liked that, you'll love Comic Papyrus!

[http://www.barthandco.com/blog.php?i=5](http://www.barthandco.com/blog.php?i=5)

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mullikine
I want to remove my eyes now

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pfdietz
I always spell it "keming".

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Stratoscope
Fans of typographic humor may enjoy Liz Crain's ceramic work. One of her
specialties is ceramic pieces that look like old rusted metal cans. And her
husband is a retired typesetter, so the cans often feature typographic themes.

After buying her Interrobang piece a while back, we asked her to make a Keming
can to go with it. Here they are together:

[https://geary.smugmug.com/Art/i-qCBqjqb/A](https://geary.smugmug.com/Art/i-qCBqjqb/A)

I love the way she made it so you can see both the "m" and the "rn".

[http://lizcrainceramics.com/](http://lizcrainceramics.com/)

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Sharlin
Hellvetica.

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mockingbirdy
I like how it makes me angry. Finally feeling something again.

Thank you for making this world a better place.

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yay_cloud2
I love how a font can inspire this kind of deep, primal anger. Like smelling
salts for the feels.

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setquk
Yes. My other half hasn’t got over the 30 minute rant and regular random
explosions about it to this day when we hired a plumber and his van had comic
sans and clipart from Microsoft office on the side. This was 15 years ago.

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aasasd
While we're on the pedantry topic, I'd like to put in a word for proper
sentence structures.

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raimue
At first I was not sure whether the web font was maybe not properly loading.

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jerrre
Strange how the italic version seems much less bad.

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sdx23
less bad? To me it's awful with the different thicknesses (not sure, perhaps
something is broken with how it's rendered here).

[https://i.imgur.com/e3KUUuY.png](https://i.imgur.com/e3KUUuY.png)

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aasasd
Doesn't look like that on Mac. Seems like a bad case of disabled ClearType,
aka subpixel anti-aliasing. Dunno if the font also contributes to that.

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shdon
This is the kind of thing I'd put in a CSS stylesheet on April Fools Day.

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rangibaby
Oh god

Serious: Neue Haas Grotesk is Helvetica the way it is supposed to be:
[http://www.fontbureau.com/nhg/](http://www.fontbureau.com/nhg/)

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imron
The quick brown _fox_.

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sanlyx
Grumpy wizards make toxic brew for the _evil_ Queen _and Jack_

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jjgod
> This project began by pulling the original “Helvetica” font from my system
> files, and making a copy of it. From there I opened it in FontForge, which
> is a brilliant open source font editor.

Pretty sure the license won’t allow you to do any modification to the font
installed on your system.

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Crespyl
I suspect this might qualify as a work of satire or parody.

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crtasm
His readme on github claims copyright and uses the MIT licence. Hmm.

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BonesJustice
heh, I’ve seen so many layout and rendering issues with custom fonts in the
browser, I honestly couldn’t tell whether this was a joke or a glitch ;)

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brennebeck
To quote Slipknot: “I push my fingers into my eyes It's the only thing that
slowly stops the ache”

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adrianN
This seems to be the font that Rational DOORS uses. Also Rational ClearQuest,
but only in IE.

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Tloewald
Wait, isn't that just Arial?

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cylinder714
I must inform the OpenBSD team!

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7six
Omg kerning

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VikingCoder
It's unbearable.

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Exuma
This makes my anxiety so bad

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kensign
photoshop 4, all over again

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Odenwaelder
OH GOD MY EYES

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Brometheus
Still a better love story than twilight.

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FactolSarin
I don't get it. Helvetica is a perfectly okay font.

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adamtulinius
It's a joke.

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FactolSarin
Obviously it's a joke. But I didn't get it. I thought this was making fun of
Helvetica, but as was pointed out elsewhere, apparently its not. This is
basically "poorly kerned Helvetica." Which was the part I missed.

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adamtulinius
If you knew it was a joke, you could have asked for an explanation instead. ;)

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FactolSarin
I thought that was implicit in "I don't get it."

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labster
I'm so tired of Helvetica everywhere that this is actually an improvement.
Once upon a time it was a great way to make an modernist artistic statement,
like "Ill" should be three straight lines. Now Helvetica is a meaningless
default choice.

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bjoli
Helvetica is a fine default choice. So is Arial or verdana or any other
"boring" font.

I'll go one step further and claim that the times i visited a website where
the selected fonts actually improved over browser defaults can be counted on
one hand.

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kqr
I don't agree about Verdana. Boring typefaces are fine; typefaces designed for
the 640x480 displays of the 1990's have very little space today.

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hinkley
One one project we had to cram a lot of text into a columnar UI. A UI that
would be used in meetings on a projector.

So we had everyone stand at the back of a medium sized conference room and do
a poor man’s eye exam. Verdana had the smallest font that was still readable.
Narrower font means less line wrapping and text clipping. None of us knew any
font lore so I didn’t learn until much later that this was a design goal of
Verdana, but I’d say mission accomplished.

Corporate tools at headquarters didn’t like it, and with no context demanded
we change it back to a “normal” font. Apparently I’m still upset about this.

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Pulcinella
I teach Chemistry and have come to rely on Trebuchet MS. It has good
readability even at the back of the classroom and it’s capital I, lowercase l,
and number 1 are all distinct. You’d be surprised how common students are
confused by Carbon and Iodine (CI) vs Chlorine (Cl) for example.

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DonHopkins
You could make your presentations more "multimedia" so the people at the back
of the room can smell the difference.

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kqr
I think the word you are looking for is multi _modal_.

