Helvetica, Arial in Grotesque Accident

Friday 23 December 2005 — This is close to 19 years old. Be careful.

sIFR is a technique for displaying headlines online, whereby plain heading tags are included in the HTML, but are replaced dynamically with nicer-looking Flash headlines. It provides the benefit of simple and accessible HTML with the beautiful cosmetics of Flash.

What caught my eye, though, were the clever type jokes in the sIFR sample page. I especially liked “Helvetica, Arial in Grotesque Accident”. Akzidenz-Grotesk is a typeface similar to both Helvetica and Arial. The name is from the German Akzidenzschrift, meaning display face or jobbing type; and Grotesk, the German spelling of grotesque, which was a current term for sans-serif in the 1890’s when Akzidenz-Grotesk was designed.

Comments

[gravatar]
Mike D. 1:35 PM on 23 Dec 2005
Oh my god, THANK YOU. I first released sIFR like a year and a half ago, have probably gotten a half million pages views to the sIFR section and not a single person has commented on the typography jokes.

Alright!
[gravatar]
Kudla 8:28 PM on 23 Dec 2005
Ned, there are geeks, then there are Geeks.
Your geekitude extends in so many directions, it is clear
you are are a capital G!

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