Design

Orange, Gap, Muji, Currys and British Gas. The chances are that you’ve walked past a sign for one or more of these companies today but did you notice the recurring theme that runs through the logos of each of these corporate behemoths? Despite being disparate brands, the one thing that connects them is their use of the typeface Helvetica. Since its creation in 1957 by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffman for the Haas Type Foundry, Helvetica has become so ubiquitous that we hardy perceive it anymore, yet this invisibility is at the root of its popularity.

Helvetica is the shining light of the typographic world and has become the darling of the design crowd. So much so that to celebrate its 50th anniversary this year, a documentary film was made about the font’s history in addition to a major exhibition at London’s Design Museum, where 50 designers were allocated a random year from Helvetica’s lifetime, and asked to create an image of cultural significance.

Enduring appeal
But why is the typeface as popular today as it was 50 years ago – what’s the secret to its endurance?
“Part of its charm is that it is so neutral,” explains Wayne Ford, design director at PrintWeek publisher Haymarket. “There are so many typefaces out there that are so popular, but the signature of the designer is in all of the work.”

Another self-confessed fan of Helvetica is David Hillman, a designer renowned for his work on newspapers and magazines. In 1988, Hillman combined a flaunty Garamond “The” with a sober “Guardian” Helvetica for the redesign of the Guardian newspaper. He reckons that Helvetica is a typeface that suits every occasion.

“I grew up with it. As a student at the London school of print and graphic arts, it was the first beautiful typeface that ever came out. We knew it as ‘Neue Haas Grotesk’.

People like Muller Brockmann were using it. People like Massimo Vignelli were using it in that Swiss grid concept,” explains Hillman.

Iconic graphic designer Peter Saville, goes one step further and refers to Helvetica as “the white emulsion of typefaces,” because of its simplicity. “It’s an exemplary typeface – it just gives you the letters.

Helvetica leaves you with just the shapes. Other typefaces give you that but with other characteristics, whereas Helvetica is reduced down to just letters,” says Saville.

Flexible design
The design of the font also enables you to do something that other fonts cannot, according to Massimo Vignelli, influential designer and perhaps Helvetica’s greatest advocate. “[With Helvetica] you can put letters very close together – no other typeface would allow you to do that, no other typeface had that tight curtain.”

Despite such accolades from the design elite today, Helvetica – or ‘Neue Haas Grotesk’ as it was originally christened before taking the Latin name for Switzerland ‘Confederatio Helvetica’ in 1960 – truly achieved global popularity following Vignelli’s use of it in the creation of American Airlines’ new logo in 1967, in addition to his design for the New York subway signage system and map in 1972. This catapulted the font into American visual culture. When Helvetica Neue, a reworking of Helvetica was released in 1983, the font became even more fashionable.

Different designers came to it in different stages of its lifetime. While Vignelli was there pretty much from the beginning, Peter Saville started using Helvetica on the cover designs of some of Factory Records’ albums in the 1980s, in the process creating some of the most iconic record sleeves ever created. “Back in the days of Peter Saville Associates in 1987, we did some type on the New Order
single ‘Touched By The Hand Of God’. My colleague Brett Wickens did it and it was the first time we started playing with Helvetica. We used it for a deliberate recognition of the ’60s in the ’80s,” says Saville.

While Saville was using Helvetica for iconic bands such as New Order and for the logo of Whitechapel gallery in 1985, Neville Brody used it for the design of Arena magazine in 1987 and Hillman juxtaposed it fashionably for the Guardian in 1988.

Because of this, Helvetica became cool by association. It was a strong feature in the progressive and influential iconography of the time.

“Things became identified and celebrated through design,” says Saville. “The visual collaterals to that became hip through association. Album covers were seen as cool, then Helvetica becomes cool.”

Reinventing itself
Nowhere was this more the case than with Mark Blamire and Rob O’Connor’s film poster for the cult Scottish movie Trainspotting. The strong black and white pictures of characters, the clean type in orange, the crisp white background. When all of the elements were brought together it seemed to say “I’m cool, I’m fresh, I’m from the ’90s”.

Using Helvetica for the poster design was a conscious decision for Blamire.

“It kind of felt like it should be a train timetable, so the typeface leant itself to being used and got over the train theme a little. It was also because of the drug references in the film. We did a lot of research into chemical packaging and the font turned up a lot in these printed items,” says Blamire.

The film was a big hit, as was the poster, copies of which sold in enormous volumes and adorned the walls of many a student bedsit. However, like all success stories there is always a downside. Helvetica is now so global that its appeal has inevitably lessened and as the preferred choice for big brand names, it is little wonder that the font is now perceived as a corporate identity typeface.

“Helvetica is now ubiquitous,” says Saville. “That dilutes it and it dilutes its potential meaning. It’s worn out its potency. It’s just there now in a relatively meaningless way. I use it now in a statement upon a statement – it’s past trying to say anything,” adds Saville.

End of an era?
Given its omnipresence, some Helvetica fans have started to move away from the type preferring the likes of Univers instead, which was released around the same time, or even reverting back to its original inspiration, Akzidenz Grotesk.

“Akzidenz grotesk is more elegant than some of the Helvetica versions. There’s a running joke in this office that I only have two fonts, Helvetica and Didi [a medium sans serif typeface],” says Hillman.

Despite this shift, no typeface has managed to recreate the moment when Helvetica exploded into visual culture in the ’60s and then again in the ’80s. Helvetica’s heyday coincided with the heightened importance and awareness of typography – this was an era when designers were consciously thinking about type and about the power of type.

Since then, the effectiveness of type has blossomed and audience familiarity of typography has grown.

Few designs have had the iconic impact that Helvetica has and it’s debatable if they will in the future.

There may even come a time when Helvetica is cast into the dustbin of history, as Saville points out: “It’s [Helvetica] as timeless as things can be but it’s not ultimately timeless.”