I found the Almarai typeface recently which was the perfect free Helvetica-esque font that I was looking for, for my personal rebrand:
After trying it out for a while, I eventually realised the numbers don’t look great IMO… but thought I can probably live with it.
Later on, I saw the colon ‘:’ character and it’s one of those really ‘low down’ ones which I hate.
Is it cool to just swap out certain characters here and there with similar font? Say if I just went with Arial / Helvetica when it came to using numbers a colon?
I’d probably only do it with smaller chunks of text (e.g. contact details in a website footer) rather than pages of body copy.
Both the colon and the semicolon must sit on the baseline to match the period (the full stop) and the comma. Raising the glyphs higher isn’t a good solution. The problem you’re seeing with the type family you mentioned is that the upper dot of the colon (and the semicolon) is lower than in most fonts.
Swapping out the Almarai colon and semicolon with Helvetica or Arial wouldn’t be appropriate because both typefaces use square dots, whereas Almarai uses round dots throughout the typeface. If you want to swap out one glyph in a font for another using a different typeface, at least use one that matches.
A better solution, in my opinion, is to open the Almarai fonts and adjust the position of the upper dots, then save them to new fonts. Doing this is legal with Google fonts since they’re distributed with an open-source license. This would be easy to do using FontForge, which is free.
Altering the numerals in FontForge is also possible, but redesigning them would be a much larger task than moving dots.