It is inanimate, yet dynamic; simple, yet elegant; common yet bearing rare lines. It has a vibrant public life but its beauty lies in its invisibility. You know it intimately, but perhaps not well.
Helvetica, the font, is the visage of which we speak. There was a time when the word font was the province of graphic designers and book publishers. The rest of us figured it was just a high-falutin’ word for fountain.
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Today, with computers and their ubiquitous drop-down menus and selections, font is a household word.
And among the fonts, Helvetica stands alone. In fact, it is now the topic of a documentary, Helvetica, which is making headlines wherever it is shown, and has also been the hero of a book, Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface.
There’s a skill to selecting the right font for a communications job. In the Producer, we’ve put a lot of thought into the type used in body copy to ensure it is clear and easy to read.
The text in the opinion piece at the left uses Janson Text. Our news stories are in Minion. Both of those fonts have the wee curlicues on the edges of the letters, called serifs, that make smaller text easier to read.
These fonts also have the benefit of allowing us to put a lot of information into a relatively small space, and we news folks absolutely adore that.
But for graphics and several other uses in this newspaper, we rely on the sans serif Helvetica because of its clean lines and its large “family” of styles including bold, book, condensed, italic and a boatload of others.
Breathless website reviews of the documentary make much of the fact that Helvetica is the font used on the New York subway system – as though we’re all familiar with Gotham transit.
But if you look around, Helvetica is indeed just about everywhere. BASF, Evian and BMW use it in their logos, for example, and you’ll find it in more than one ad within this newspaper and every other newspaper on the planet.
You just can’t beat a good Swiss design, this one developed by Eduard Hoffman and executed by Max Miedinger. They initially called it Neue Hans Grotesk. For some unfathomable reason, the name did not catch on with font users. So they opted for Helvetica as a derivative of Helvetia, the Latin word for Switzerland.
According to a story this spring in the Globe and Mail, Helvetica became the darling of graphics and newspaper folk at the same time it became a default font on Mac computers, which were widely used as desktop publishing evolved.
Eventually Microsoft came up with its own version, Arial, but die-hard designers scoff at it as a “scourge” and a “shameless imposter.” Designers can be a flamboyant lot.
In honour of Helvetica’s 50th birthday, we’ve used a very special font for this week’s column.
You know what it is.
