Typeface Story
The most loved typeface in the world
In Steve Jobs's famous Stanford speech he reflected how he became attached to typefaces.
Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
Thanks to this fate, ten years later, he applied what he learned in the calligraphy class to the Macintosh project he led. Since then, Apple’s home operating systems, whether it is Mac or iOS, have embedded many beautiful and practical fonts.
If you were a user of the iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, or iPhone 6 when they were first released, or ever used Yosemite as your Mac’s operating system, your digital life was dominated by the typeface we are going to talk about today — Helvetica.
Helvetica Everywhere
If an Oscar is held for the typefaces born in the past 100 years, Helvetica can definitely win a trophy. It was so iconic that even a documentary was filmed to commemorate its 50th anniversary.
Even though now Apple no longer uses Helvetica as a system font, it has never faded out of the stage of history. Look around, you can definitely find its traces:
The birth of Helvetica
Helvetica was produced as a typesetting type in 1957 by Swiss designers Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffman.
Helvetica was firstly named Neue Haas Grotesk, which means “Haas’s new sans serif type”. Later, Haas’s German parent company Stempel later renamed it as Helvetica (meaning “Swiss” in Latin) to make it more competitive in the international market.
Regardless of the name, the popularity of Helvetica is inseparable from the help of the United States. There is a vivid record of this in the documentary Helvetica.
As soon as Helvetica landed in the U.S., it swept the nation’s design industry. As narrated by the designer Michael Beirut in the documentary, you can have a sneak peek of how mind-blowing the typeface was:
…And in fact corporate identity in the sixties, that’s what it sort of consisted of. Clients would come in and they’d have piles of goofy old brochures from the fifties that hide like shapes on them and goofy bad photographs.
They’d have some letterhead that would say Amalgamated Widget on the top in some goofy, maybe a script typeface, above Amalgamated Widget it would have an engraving showing their headquarters in Paducah, Lowa, with smokestacks belching smoke you know.
And then you go to a corporate identity consultant circa 1965, 1966, and they would take that and lay it here and say: Here’s your current stationery, and all it implies, and this is what we’re proposing. And next to that, next to the belching smokestacks and the nuptial script and the ivory paper, they’d have a crisp bright white piece of paper and instead of Amalgamated Widget, founded 1857, it just would say Widgco, in Helvetica Medium.
Can you imagine how bracing and thrilling that was? That must have seemed like you’d crawled through a desert with your mouth just caked with filthy dust and then someone is offering you a clear, refreshing, distilled, icy glass of water to clear away all this horrible, kind of like, the burden of history.
It must have been just fantastic.
Helvetica began to be adopted as the official typeface in the New York subway system in the 1960s because it is easy to read. Today, Helvetica has become part of the New York subway’s identity.
How to identify Helvetica？
- First of all, Helvetica is a sans serif font. It has a square shape and even strokes.
- Thanks to the relatively large X-shaped height, Helvetica gives a full impression.
- Look at its s, e and c, you will find that the tangents at the end of their strokes are horizontal.
- Also, there are no dots in Helvetica. Look at its i and j.
- Yet, the most iconic look of Helvetica is the waterdrop-shaped space circulated by the stroke of the letter a. After Helvetica, this design began to be gradually adopted by other fonts.
An affordable alternative to Helvetica?
In 1982, Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders designed a font for Monotype Typography and named it Arial.
This font is very similar to Helvetica. At that time, the copyright of Helvetica belonged to Linotype Typography. One of the purposes of designing Arial was to reduce the font copyright fees paid for using Helvetica.
IBM first introduced Arial on its own printers, and later the affordable Arial was embedded in Windows 3.1 by Microsoft. Soon the Helvetica-like font was accepted with the popularity of Windows.
So, how to distinguish Helvetica and Arial, the “half brothers”? The easiest way is to look at their capital letter R. Helvetica’s R has a curved right foot, while Arial’s R is inclined and straight.
This animated GIF can also help you notice the difference between the two fonts. (P.S.: R is toxic)
Controversy over Helvetica
According to the modernist view, the font should be “like a transparent container”, so that the reader can focus on the content expressed by the text instead of the font when reading. Because of its minimalism look, Helvetica is suitable for expressing a variety of information and has been widely used in the modern world of graphic design.
Even so, perhaps because of the overheated popularity, objections followed: for example, using Helvetica is a lazy practice, it will make your design personality-less, etc…
However, in fact, with the rise of digital gadgets, Helvetica’s shortcomings have begun to appear.
Next episode…
What’s the limitation of Helvetica? Why did Apple stop using Helvetica as its system font? Apart from Helvetica, what are other most loved modern typefaces? I’ll walk you through these topics in the next episode. Keep in tune!
Previous episode
Typography: Domineering from the era of ancient Rome and Gutenberg
References
- ALL ABOARD: HOW DESIGN SAVED THE NEW YORK CITY SUBWAY https://network9.biz/next-stop-how-design-saved-the-new-york-city-subway/
- The font Helvetica which can be used everywhere is new, and the last update was 35 years ago http://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1630516716953233675
- Wikipedia: Helvetica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica
- “Fonto No Fushigi”, Akira Kobayashi, Facebook Culture Publishing, 2013
