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It’s been said that Helvetica is like water. I recently learned they’ve redesigned my drink of choice when it comes to typefaces.
The font has been one of the most ubiquitous in graphic design since Swiss designers created it in 1957. That makes it two years older than yours truly. That means it might have been used on my birth certificate (I doubt it) and it could be used on my tombstone.
The sans serif Helvetica got its last redesign in 1982, about the time I started working in print advertising. Contrary to what some might tell you, I’m not so old that I used hot metal type. Some of the Linotype equipment was still sitting out back when I arrived, but it hadn’t been used for several years.
When I started our typesetting equipment was optical and our type was exposed and developed on film. That 1982 version, called Neue Helvetica, wasn’t actually ever used on the phototypesetters I used. It would have required purchasing new font strips and licensing and money didn’t grow on trees.
Even when I switched to digital postscript printing later in the 1980s the old Helvetica was still the font of choice on those computers. Nearly everything came with Helvetica as the default setting.
It is clean and simple, easy to read and designers who knew what they were doing could alter the kerning (space between characters) to get lots of different looks when designing ads and logos.
Any time we redesigned the “look” of the newspaper, we created a “stylebook” that dictated what fonts, sizes and weights should be used where on the page. A lot of my stylebooks used Helvetica liberally.
I liked it in headlines and in cutlines (photo captions). Our sports agate, used for box scores and such, was usually 8-point or smaller Helvetica. I liked some version of the serif font Times for body text but Helvetica looked good everywhere else.
With the digital age now decades advanced Helvetica has fallen out of style. Maybe we overused it and people simply got tired of it.
Late in my publishing career some of my graphic artists were known to loathe the typeface and wouldn’t be caught dead with it in their work. I think it was their loss.
This spring, Monotype, the company that owns the design, announced that after 36 years they were bringing out a remake of the typeface to be called Helvetica Now. They claim they’ve been working on it for five years, which seems crazy to me but somewhere I read that included 40,000 characters and glyphs.
They claim it will be more readable on small devices such as phones and watches, down to 4-point, and at the same time can move up to billboard presentation size if needed.
I’ve got to admit, after looking at their work I’ve fallen in love with Helvetica all over again. It’s smooth, real smooth.
Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: