Lower case numbers fit in the best with body text. They're used in the same way small caps are used for acronyms -- so you don't get ugly blocks of characters larger than their neighbors that call attention to themselves. It's a feature, not a bug.
In contrast, you use standard numerals for mathematics, spreadsheets, next to uppercase letters, etc. Anywhere where the context is numerical or technical or calling attention.
There's nothing "blatantly wrong" about it. Ultimately it's a stylistic choice (most people don't bother, same as most people don't bother with small caps), but it's a really nice one. I think it's cool to see it in neo-grotesque personally.
There's nothing inherent to the aesthetic principles of sans-serif that precludes them. From my understanding, the historical reason why they weren't used in the mid 1900's was for technical reasons with phototypesetting, needing to limit the character set. Now that it's all digital and Unicode we're able to repopularize them.
No, but there is historical precedence and coherence. It's like putting Greek columns on a Walmart. Or rapping in Old English.
There's "nothing inherent to the aesthetic principles" of rotary phones, but you don't use a smart phone with a rotary phone interface do you?
Taste is formed with the times in which they are developed in. And there are those who have taste coherence and those who do not.
"Nothing inherent to the aesthetic principles" of emo hair fringe or disco attire, but you wouldn't wear either to a historical reenactment of the American Civil War, either.
When people use Humanist typography they are invoking a specific feel.
I guess I just find myself disagreeing. I don't find lowercase numerals any different from extending a Latin font to Cyrillic or Greek. In my view, they're just extra characters, rather than an aesthetic choice of the font. Ideally, good body text fonts will have both types of numerals to choose from.
I don't see any lower-case numbers on neo-grotesk, nor do any of the screenshots on the GH page show it so it's not just my machine. Could you maybe have an incomplete font with some weird font-substitution quirks?
There aren't that many descenders in lowercase English, but in a script like Shavian where there are many, the old style figures feel really "at home".
Microsoft's font designers, apparently. (Corbel and Candara both have them, despite it being kind of weird for a sans-serif font-- those were MS-commissioned fonts launched as part of the ClearType Font Collection with Windows Vista and Office 2007.)
None of the fonts here have lowercase figures by default on Mac.
(If Neo-Grotesque is showing lowercase figures on your machine, I think something funky is going on with your font stack-- pretty sure none of those fonts should have them by default.)
Who are these people designing typefaces in the neo-grotesk family with old style numerics?