Helvetica

This article is about the typeface Helvetica. For the Confoederatio Helvetica, see Switzerland.

For the documentary, see Helvetica (film).

Helvetica

Category	Sans-serif
Classification	Grotesque sans-serif
Designer(s)	Max Miedinger
Foundry	Haas Typefoundry
Date released	1957
Re-issuing foundries	Mergenthaler Linotype Company
Design based on	Akzidenz Grotesk
Variations	Helvetica Neue Swiss 721 BT

Comparison of distinguishing characters in Akzidenz-Grotesk, Folio, Helvetica, and Univers 55.

Helvetica is the name of a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger.

History

Helvetica was created by Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas type foundry) of Münchenstein, Switzerland. Haas set out to design a new sans-serif typeface that could compete with Akzidenz-Grotesk in the Swiss market. Originally called Neue Haas Grotesk, the typeface's name was changed by Haas' German parent company Stempel in 1960 to Helvetica — derived from Confoederatio Helvetica, the Latin name for Switzerland — in order to make it more marketable internationally.

In 2007, director Gary Hustwit released a documentary, Helvetica, to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the typeface. In the film, graphic designer Wim Crouwel said that "Helvetica was a real step from the 19th century typeface. … We were impressed by that because it was more neutral, and neutralism was a word that we loved. It should be neutral. It shouldn’t have a meaning in itself. The meaning is in the content of the text and not in the typeface."

Usage

Helvetica on the New York City Subway

Helvetica is among the most widely used sans-serif typefaces. Versions exist for the Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Greek alphabets. Unicode character sets include special characters and accents for Hindi, Urdu, Khmer, and Vietnamese. Variants of character-based writing systems, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, have been developed to complement Helvetica.

Major companies and products that have used Helvetica in their wordmarks include 3M, American Airlines, American Apparel, the former American Telephone & Telegraph Company, Crate & Barrel, Energizer batteries, Greyhound Lines, ITV, Jeep, Lufthansa, Marks & Spencer, Microsoft, Karlsberger, National Car Rental, Now That's What I Call Music!, Panasonic, Target Corporation and Thames Television.

Apple, Inc.'s Mac OS X uses Helvetica as its default font for numerous applications, and the interfaces for the iPhone and newer iPods use Helvetica almost exclusively. New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) uses Helvetica for all of its subway signs (though some pre-1968 signs sport the similar Medium Standard, an Akzidenz Grotesk-like sans-serif).

Canada's federal government uses Helvetica as its identifying typographic voice, and encourages its use in all federal agencies and websites. Helvetica is also used in the USA television rating system (TV-G, TV-Y, TV-Y7, etc.)

From April 2007 to March 2008, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City displayed an exhibit called "50 Years of Helvetica" [1] that celebrated the many usages of the font.

The typeface used on the Space Shuttle is Helvetica

Helvetica is widely used by the U.S. government; for example, federal income tax forms are set in Helvetica, and the NASA space agency uses the type on the Space Shuttle Orbiter.

Variants

Alternative character sets

Helvetica Fractions contains only characters representing numbers, fractions, percentages.

Helvetica Central European contains only characters supporting letters found in Central European languages.

Helvetica Cyrillic contains only just enough characters supporting letters found in Basic Latin, and Cyrillic code pages.

Helvetica Greek contains only just enough characters supporting letters found in Basic Latin, and Greek code pages.

Helvetica World is a family of four fonts published by Linotype in 2002. It contains 1866 glyphs per font, supporting characters from Latin Extended, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, superscripts and subscripts, letterlike symbols, arrows, mathematical symbols, box drawing, block elements, alphabetic presentation forms, Arabic presentation forms. Similar to Arial, Arabic glyphs do not have fixed weight within each glyph.

Styling variants

Helvetica Inserat is a redrawn version of Helvetica Black Condensed that gives the glyphs a more squared appearance, similar to Impact and Haettenschweiler. Strike with strokes in $, ¢ are replaced by non-strikethrough version. 4 is opened at top. Cyrillic characters are supported.

Helvetica Textbook contains monospaced version of the font. Some characters such as 1, 4, 6, 9, I, a, f, q, mu, and ¶ are drawn differently from the proportional space version.

Helvetica Rounded contains rounded stroke terminators.

Neue Helvetica, a reworking of Helvetica with a more structurally unified set of weights and widths, was developed at D. Stempel AG, Linotype's daughter company. The studio manager was Wolfgang Schimpf, his assistant Reinhard Haus. Manager of the project was René Kerfante. Erik Spiekermann was the design consultant and designed the literature for the launch in 1983. The weight and width program of Helvetica Neue is similar to that of the Univers typeface designed by Adrian Frutiger. Neue Helvetica also comes in Outline, but not Textbook or Rounded fonts.

Similar typefaces

Generic versions of Helvetica have been made by various vendors, including Monotype Imaging (CG Triumvirate), ParaType (Pragmatica), Bitstream (Swiss 721).

Monotype's Arial, designed in 1982, while different from Helvetica in some few details, has identical character widths, and is indistinguishable by most non-specialists. The capital letters C, G, and R, as well as the lowercase letters a, e, r, and t, are useful for quickly distinguishing Arial and Helvetica. Differences include:

• Helvetica's strokes are typically cut either horizontally or vertically. This is especially visible in the t, r, and C. Arial employs slanted stroke cuts.
• Helvetica's G has a well-defined spur; Arial does not.
• The tails of the R glyphs and the a glyphs are different.

Nimbus Sans, another similar font family that incorporates fonts designed in 1940 (Nimbus Sans bold condensed, Nimbus Sans bold condensed (D)) and 1946 (Nimbus Sans Black Condensed, Nimbus Sans Black Condensed (D)), is produced by URW. Nimbus Sans L fonts were released under the GNU General Public License.

"Helv", later known as "MS Sans Serif", is a sans-serif font that shares many key characteristics to Helvetica, including the horizontally and vertically-aligned stroke terminators and more uniformed stroke widths within a glyph.

External links

• Typowiki: Helvetica
• linotype.com: Helvetica Typeface Family overview & related Information
• Helvetica: A Documentary Film by Gary Hustwit
• Arial vs Helvetica
• MoMA Exhibition (2007), 50 Years of Helvetica
• Helvetica at 50 — BBC News article
• The Helvetica Hegemony: How an unassuming font took over the world — article in Slate, published May 25, 2007
• Helvetica: The little typeface that leaves a big mark — Herald Tribune article on the 50 years of Helvetica
• Photo of Helvetica wallpaper
• fontshop.com: Alternatives to Helvetica
• Helvetica at IMDb, a documentary film about the making, use, and history of the Helvetica font