Bloomingdale’s, Gap, Knoll, BMW, Verizon, Urban Outfitters, Nestlé, Lufthansa, and Saab have all use it. It’s used by big corporations like American Airlines, British Gas, Muji, and until recently IBM. Indeed, Helvetica is ambient and pervasive and absolutely everywhere. The word “ubiquitous” gets thrown around a lot these days, but Helvetica truly is-at multiple points in Helvetica, designers of all opinions about the typeface describe it as so widely used that seeing it feels as natural and unremarkable as breathing air. Decades later, when the first Macintosh computer hit the market, Helvetica was bundled with it as a default font for the personal computer. “That was a huge step for getting it into the graphic houses in the U.S.,” says Hustwit. The fact that it continued to be popular throughout the next half a century, however, was thanks largely to two populist technologies: first, Helvetica was made available for Linotype, those typesetting machines critical to producing newspapers, ads, and books until their obsolescence in the late ’70s (not coincidentally, the Haas foundry was owned by Linotype). The new name positioned the typeface as synonymous with Swiss cutting-edge typesetting technology and was a no-brainer for those in favor of the new Swiss modernism. Also, it was market savvy: “The name Helvetica was purely a m arketing decision,” says Hustwit. So the foundry added a ‘c’ and voila-catchy yet reasoned patriotic without being too referential. In 1960, the Haas foundry’s German parent company Stempel suggested changing the name to something undeniably Swiss-something like Helvetia, the Latin word that literally translates to “Switzerland.” Haas found it a bit grandiose to name a typeface so directly after his native country, even if it was meant to represent just that. According to Matthew Carter, the name came from Hoffmann’s idea to make a modernized version of Akzidenz Grotesk, a traditional 19th century German sans serif. When Miedinger drew up a typeface to rival Adrian Frutiger’s Univers in 1957, the Haas foundry initially named it Neue Haas Grotesk. Now feels like as good a time as any to revisit its timeless star. Yes, it’s been 10 years since Helvetica became a major film success, and ushered in an era of design movies and documentaries. In 2007, it also became the unlikely subject of a documentary, shot on a credit-card budget by design doc-maker and VR filmmaker Gary Hustwit, who at that point had never made a full-length film. Limited-edition letterpress print of Experimental Jetset‘s “Meet the Cast” design.Įxactly 60 years later, the typeface is still a symbol of Modernism to those attuned to such things, but to much of the world it just feels familiar: the font of post office boxes and the default sans on a Mac. It was also out of this atmosphere that Eduard Hoffmann, owner of the Haas foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland, and designer Max Miedinger developed the typeface that best represents the movement: Helvetica. It was out of this mindset that the Swiss style of graphic design-clean, logical, mechanical in its perfection-became a global phenomenon. In the post-war period of the 1950s and 1960s, there was a pretty pervasive mentality among designers that their field could and should be part of the efforts to rebuild and reconstruct, moving on with both rationality and idealism from a messy recent history. Posters for Helvetica by Gary Hustwit, which turns 10 this year.ĭesigners: Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffman
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