Proxima Nova – The New Helvetica
How To Keep Your Brand’s Identity
Type is a brand manifestation and yet remains one of the least understood components of branding. Designers know, however, that the right typeface has always been a core element of a brand’s identity – just like all other design components such as color, imagery and tonality, every letter is a reflection of a brand.
The return of the font-face property in CSS 3, coupled with browser compatibility for Internet Explorer 9 in 2011, has fueled the designer’s excitement: One became free to embed a unique font instead of being reliant on the computer’s limited system fonts like Arial, Verdana and Georgia.
Along with the all-time classics Myriad Pro and Futura, Proxima Nova has quickly become one of the web’s most trendy and frequently used fonts.1
Where the font was relatively unknown a few years ago, Proxima Nova’s ongoing popularity is now indisputable. On WebINK’s Most Popular Web Fonts of 20122, Mark Simonson’s Proxima Nova came in 5th in 2011, and climbed up to second place for 2012.
With the growing popularity of a font, the identity that comes from using a distinct type type creates interchangeability when it’s being used everywhere. SumAll, Warby Parker, Squarespace, Smashing Magazine and many other sites utilized Proxima Nova with designers continuously having discussions about its appropriation.3 4 5
We at SumAll chose Proxima Nova two years ago because it was one of the first complete web-optimized font sets with many styles; its classic geometric sans serif design suited our brand and it was not prevalent back then. In addition, our app being completely web-based, we were looking for less font restrictions regarding online usage – Proxima Nova was sold on MyFonts which practices a simplified royalty handling.
Just a few months later we ran into the brand issue of not being clear-cut enough, we actually swapped the distinctive “a” character with its stylistic alternate to set ourselves apart.
As a latest adaption, we chose to do our own redesign for the numbers. The numbers are SumAll’s most important set of characters and are outstandingly present in our app considering we are all about displaying data.
Here is a quick overview on the redesign process:
Rough design ideas based on the regular Proxima Nova numbers
Comparison of Proxima Nova and SumAll numbers, the numbers are much straighter and grid-based, a bit more masculine and show less character
Our new numbers come in the styles for Light, Regular, Semibold, and Bold
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