Kris Sowersby has a nice writeup of the late Evert Bloemsma's sans-serif masterwork Balance on I Love Typography today. I admire Balance, and bought it to use in WebTrends' re-brand a few years ago, but wasn't able to make it work. I think that was a shortcoming on my part rather than the typeface, which has an arresting, unsentimental color and a noble underlying principle, to wit: the top halves of letters are the part that people actually use to determine word shape; word shape is what determines legibility. In most typefaces, the upper part of a glyph is smaller, so that the glyph "sits" nicely on its baseline. With Balance, Bloemsma reversed that tradition. The upper part is equal ("balanced") in weight to the lower, and in some cases a little larger. In large sizes, the glyphs can appear almost topheavy. In text, they work beautifully in the service of reading. I need to sack up and figure out how to use it better.
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