![]() ![]() This made it so expensive to develop - and to use - new typefaces, that new designs were relatively rare, and many of the most popular fonts were centuries-old, like Baskerville and Bodoni.īut things were very different in 1961, when the British typography designer Matthew Carter was asked to design a modernized version of Akzidenz Grotesk for the signage in a new terminal at Heathrow Airport. Anyone wishing to use a particular font had to buy an entire set of letters. ![]() In those days, typefaces were made by carving the shapes of the letters from metal. The result was Neue Haas Grotesk, but for several years few people knew about it. Hoffmann commissioned a little-known typography designer, Max Miedinger, to create the new font. It was conceived by Edouard Hoffmann, director of the Haas Type Foundry in the quiet Swiss town of Münchenstein, as a contemporary version of Akzidenz Grotesk, a late 19th-century sans serif typeface (that's one without decorative squiggles at the ends of the letters) that had become popular with Swiss graphic designers during the mid-1950s. #HELVETICA TYPEFACE SOFTWARE#And you can choose to read - and send - your e-mails in Helvetica, Verdana or Georgia, because those fonts come free with most computer software packages.ĭespite its formal brilliance, Helvetica was not especially successful when it was first introduced in 1957 under its original name, Neue Haas Grotesk. You can read a typeface for nothing if a publisher has paid a nominal fee to use it in a book or magazine. The difference is that rather than costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, they're free. Great typefaces - like the computer fonts Verdana and Georgia, and the gorgeous 18th-century print lettering of Baskerville and Bodoni - are of the same aesthetic and technical quality as more conventional luxuries, such as Aston Martin sports cars, Andreas Gursky's photographs and haute couture Chanel dresses. Like all beautifully designed typefaces, Helvetica is a democratic luxury. Many type designers have said that they can not improve on it." It's crisp, clean and sharply legible, yet humanized by round, soft strokes. "When reading it, one hardly notices the letter forms, only the meaning, it's that well-designed. "Helvetica delivers a message quickly and efficiently without imposing itself," said Christian Larsen, curator of the MoMA exhibition. Why make such a fuss about a typeface? In short, because it does its job so well. ![]()
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