Basel Neue is the complete redesign of BaselSans ITD font, the first typeface of Isaco Type foundry, launched in 2009. As with the predecessor version, Basel Neue is a legible and discrete typeface, a sans serif with thickness variation and humanistic touch. The family consists of 8 styles, 4 weights plus their respective italic versions. Download the “OT Features” pdf to know and take advantage of all font features as best as possible (in OpenType-savvy applications)! You can also view all symbols in the glyph panel of your program, or in Character Map tool (Win) or Character Viewer/Palette (Mac).
1) Basel Neue has ligatures strategically chosen. Herbert S. Zim, in the book “Codes and secret writing”, elected the most common letter pairs of English, that in the Basel Neue became discretionary ligatures. And, of course, it also has standard ligatures.
2) It’s a fun typeface. Basel Neue has a set of emoticons and fun symbols that can be activated by discretionary ligatures. Type “:-)” and a smileyface appears. Type “8-)” and a smiley with glasses appears. Type “<tel>”, “<star>” and “<heart>” and a telephone, star and heart appears. Or “<poop>”... and a graceful corresponding symbol will appear.
3) Basel Neue contains lots of useful glyphs and features. All versions have 12 recycling symbols, 7 to different types of plastic, and over 30 currency symbols. It also has fractions, old style-, lining-, tabular numbers and other OpenType features.
4) It has an organized and large character set. The fonts have extended character set to support CE, Baltic, Turkish as well as Western European languages. If you work with languages like Catalan, German, Croatian, Romanian, Dutch, Turkish, for example, the font will use the correct ligatures or characters used in these languages.
5) It’s rigorously tested. Basel Neue is available in OpenType PS and TT flavors and each version undergoes a battery of tests, with a systematic review of nodes, curves, spacing and internal data. This eliminates the possibility of errors in the font.
