‘Swiss Army Knife’ For Artists & Designers Packs Drawing Precision Into One Card
It takes great practice and skill to be able to freehand shapes. The dying art of pen on paper makes this talent all the rare.
London-based design firm Horizon is bringing back the love of drawing on paper with the ‘Horizon Helvetica’—a compact, all-in-one drawing tool it dubs as the “Swiss Army knife of sketching tools.”
To hand-draw perfect circles and lines, most people would need stationery like a protractor, compass, and ruler, which are few too many objects for creatives on the go to carry around. The Horizon Helvetica, however, packs functionalities of a ruler, compass, T-square, straightedges, isometric grid, protractor, and stencils into a single slim, stainless steel piece.
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The ruler has millimeter and centimeter measurements on one side, and reads in inches on the other.
Impressively, the entire tool is credit card-sized, so you can slip it into your cardholder and forget all about it until you need to sketch.
Built for modern artists and designers, this so-called “Swiss Army knife” also has measurements for pixels and picas. The card simulates a length of 150 pixels per inch (PPI), with proportions for pixels of 10. You’ll be able to visualize the size of UI/UX details such as buttons even before taking the wireframe to your screen.
True to its name, Horizon Helvetica has a sweet touch in that it features the quintessential designer’s typeface. Helvetica is Swiss, and this object, after all, is billed as the designer’s version of a Swiss Army knife.
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Notably, Helvetica was chosen to highlight the ruler’s wording and numbers thanks to its famed legibility.
The portable piece appears to be a hit with artists and designers even before it has taken off. Horizon Helvetica is still on Kickstarter mode, but it has already achieved 12 times its funding goal.
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