Neue Television

Endless Variability

Neue Television supports six axes: stem width, stroke weight, stroke width, stroke position and retro stroke. In this way, the middle stroke can move freely on the horizontal grid and be shaped as a long to a short stroke or as a circle – or even blend completely with the thin lines. This offers endless possibilities of movement and colour overlays. 

While the first five axes modify the size and width of the horizontal strokes, the ‘retro stroke’ axis changes the appearance of the terminals. The semi-circles blend into a soft terminal, which is modelled on the original Television. Here, too, the designer can determine the size of the transition himself or herself.

To provide even more flexibility, the complete typeface is available without the thin grid lines: Neue Television S. In this way, points or lines can be deliberately placed on top of each other.

Static Fonts

The design benefit of Neue Television clearly comes from the variable font technology, which is included with every purchase of the complete family. Each font style contains the fully filled font, the line version, 50 per cent width centre strokes and centre strokes reduced to a circle – aligned left, centred and aligned right in each case, and all in the normal style and the retro variant. This ensures that designers can also work very creatively even with the static styles.

OpenType Features

Although the Neue Television is strictly speaking a raster font, no common glyphs have been omitted – the nice to type standard set is fully supported. In addition to superscript, there are also non-aligning numerals, tabular numerals and all kinds of geometric glyphs, including the essential arrows.

A special feature are the ‘Retro Set’ stylistic alternates, which are closer to the original Television and bring with them a certain retro flair: A, Æ, K, M, N, Ŋ, R, W, k, m, n, ŋ, u, w, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, ? and ‽ – and in all the style variations.

Supported Languages

Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bislama, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan, Chamorro, Chichewa, Comorian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino/Tagalog, Finnish, Flemish, French, Gaelic, Gagauz, German, Gikuyu, Gilbertese/Kiribati, Haitian-Creole, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Javanese, Kashubian, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luba/Ciluba/Kasai, Luxembourgish, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Maori, Marquesan, Moldovan/Romanian, Montenegrin, Nauruan, Ndebele, Norwegian, Oromo, Palauan/Belauan, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Romanian, Romansh, Sami, Samoan, Sango, Serbian, Sesotho, Setswana, Seychellois-Creole, Swazi, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tahitian, Tetum, Tok-Pisin, Tongan, Tsonga, Tswana, Turkish, Turkmen, Tuvaluan, Uzbek, Wallisian, Walloon, Welsh, Xhosa, Zulu

Process – History

In the 1950s to 1960s, televisions were still manufactured with a glass cathode ray tube to display a picture. Images and font characters were projected onto this glass surface by a cathode ray moving horizontally. The horizontal lines created a grid, which was not particularly conducive to making smaller type sizes easily readable.

In 1972, Klaus Richter developed a typeface as his dissertation at the Peter-Behrens-Werkkunstschule, which was intended to ensure better legibility on black-and-white tube televisions. The special features of that typeface were larger apertures with the open and closed counters and heavier dot-shaped extensions on the terminals. Every single glyph was drawn on Schoellerhammer card with a Rapidograph technical pen, then recorded with a high-resolution video camera and played back on a black-and-white monitor. Then, photographically documented, analysed and corrected again. On the slightly enlarged photos from the video images, the slightly blurred line grid was immediately recognisable.

It was precisely these lines that inspired Klaus Richter to draw another typeface in addition to his dissertation: Television based on horizontal lines. The typeface was presented to one of the largest companies for transfer letters, approved and then marketed worldwide in various font sizes.

Television was popular in the music industry at the time: from Punk to Neue Deutsche Welle. The punk band ‘Public Image Limited’ with John Lydon (ex Johnny Rotten / Sex Pistols) used the Television font for their magazines and posters. The satirical magazine ‘Charlie Hebdo’ used it as its cover font. After transfer letters went out of fashion, Television was no longer distributed and fell into disuse.

Process – Today

When the decision was made to breathe new life into Television, one thing was absolutely clear: the typeface had to be not only digitised, it also had to be brought up to date for the new age of font formats as a variable font. Instead of being satisfied with a simple thickening of the centre lines, Gabriel and Klaus opted for a more playful transition that ranged from lines to circles. Since this gives Television a new feel, there was no need for long discussions about how close they should stay to the original. Instead of a one-to-one revival, only the basic shapes were taken over and, in the course of the revision process, errors inherent in the original font were eradicated. Adjustments to glyph widths, main stroke thicknesses and more modern shapes were only a small part of the process.

Whether the terminals of the strokes should be circular or have a smooth transition, on the other hand, was a major point of discussion. The solution was to include both – circular terminals as standard, and soft, retro ending strokes as an alternative. Now users can decide what they want to work with and how. In the variable font, it is still possible to select intermediate steps between both forms.

Since the original Television was only marketed as a headline font, and at that time it was not usual to provide large character sets, a whole range of accents, special glyphs and symbols had to be completely re-imagined and redesigned. Designing within a line grid presented some difficulties. Glyphs such as arrows, which can normally be simply mirrored, had to be drawn completely differently for all the different directions, as there were only horizontal lines.

Thanks to the smart components in the font software Glyphs 3, this work has been made much easier. Instead of having to adjust each element individually for all letters and symbols, there is only one component, a building block so to speak, which is used in all the lines and only its width is adjusted. If the basic line is now changed, all the glyphs change automatically. This helps especially with complex letters. For example, the ‘O’ has 288 vector points instead of 8 for a simple, symmetrical sans serif ‘O’.

Glyph Order and Preglyphs

All nice to type fonts provide a structured glyph order with special preglyphs for a better overview – just choose ‘CID / GID’ instead of ‘Unicode’ in your Glyphs overview. To save webspace and loading time webfonts don’t come with preglyphs.

Supported Languages

Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bislama, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan, Chamorro, Chichewa, Comorian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino/Tagalog, Finnish, Flemish, French, Gaelic, Gagauz, German, Gikuyu, Gilbertese/Kiribati, Haitian-Creole, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Javanese, Kashubian, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luba/Ciluba/Kasai, Luxembourgish, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Maori, Marquesan, Moldovan/Romanian, Montenegrin, Nauruan, Ndebele, Norwegian, Oromo, Palauan/Belauan, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Romanian, Romansh, Sami, Samoan, Sango, Serbian, Sesotho, Setswana, Seychellois-Creole, Swazi, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tahitian, Tetum, Tok-Pisin, Tongan, Tsonga, Tswana, Turkish, Turkmen, Tuvaluan, Uzbek, Wallisian, Walloon, Welsh, Xhosa, Zulu

Trials

nice to type trials come with a reduced character set in two formats: PostScript flavoured OpenType Fonts (.otf) and WOFF2 (.woff2) for web use. nice to type’s unique preglyphs are also included – please have a look above. Depending on the typeface, a few OpenType might be supported, such as alternate letter shapes or the randomize feature.

Typeface Neue Television
Designed by Gabriel Richter and Klaus Richter
Spacing and Kerning by Igino Marini
Published in 2023
Fontproduction by Christoph Koeberlin

Neue Television is a trademark of nice to type
Copyright © 2023 by nice to type – Gabriel Richter. All rights reserved.