Helfa Font Family by Delve Fonts

About: Designed by Delve Withrington, Helfa was originally inspired by the work of Frederic Goudy and in particular his 1938 typeface ‘University of California Old Style’ created for The University of California Press. The design of Helfa however is much more tempered to allow a smooth, pleasant reading experience for today’s readers.

Readability is baked in with a generous x-height, fine pro­por­tions that have a medium height-to-width ratio, and reason­able contrast in stroke weight variation. The let­ter shapes are individually drawn to be dis­tinctive, not simply mir­rored or rotated. The sturdy, bracketed serifs hold up con­fident­ly be­low twelve points. Helfa can be re­lied upon for set­ting lengthy texts at smaller sizes but is still readily ap­plic­able to a number of other tasks.

There is enough subtle detail in Helfa to hold in­terest at larg­er point sizes too. The stems are not straight lines but concave—they curve in­ward very slightly towards the middle. The serifs are subtly cupped and taper to a finish at shal­low ang­les. The curved strokes have stress stra­tegic­ally lo­cated along the cir­cum­ference and the wedge brush shaped terminal is a re­cur­ring feature through­out the type­face, es­pecial­ly in the italics.

Helfa’s natural versatility means it can be used for a wide variety of print materials such as books, maga­zines, brochures, and more. With a range of five useful weights and five corresponding true ital­ics all in OpenType format, Helfa is a solid choice for a reliable text type­face. Dis­cover just how much of a pleasure Helfa is to use, and how in­dispens­ible it is for many projects.

Tags: Font, Multi-Weight Family, Semi-Slab Serif, Serif, Slab Serif