Helsa Display

Helsa is a slim and eccentric serif for headings and short texts. It’s a modern interpretation of the narrow Elseviers of the early 20th century. The letterforms are based on Dutch samples, and in the details there are references to both American type catalogs and letters from the foundries of Wolf and Herbeck.
Due to the compact proportions of characters and the high contrast of strokes, Helsa doesn’t take up much space in the line and allows you to increase the type size freely, drawing the viewer’s attention to the text.
The typeface is suitable for branding museums and exhibitions, alternative music bands, independent clothing and perfume brands, and for any topic related to design or history.
Helsa’s character set has more than 1600 characters. It supports hundreds of languages, including extended Cyrillic, Greek, and Vietnamese, as well as many OpenType features: fractions, ligatures, old style and tabular numerals, titular letter alternates, and more. There are variants of dashes and other punctuation marks specifically for uppercase typing.
In addition to letters, the typeface contains arrows, numbers in circles (in fact, in ovals), symbols of various types of plastic, card suits and much more.
Helsa typeface was made at Paratype in 2020-2022.
Designer: Nikolay Nedashkovsky.