The world's most famous typeface was designed to look like nothing.
Helvetica began in 1957 as 'Neue Haas Grotesk', drawn by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann at a Swiss type foundry. It was renamed Helvetica, Latin for 'Swiss', to sell abroad. Its neutrality became its power: it is on subway signs, tax forms and countless logos.
In 1957, Eduard Hoffmann, director of the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland, commissioned the freelance designer Max Miedinger to create a new sans-serif typeface to compete with the popular Akzidenz-Grotesk. The result was Neue Haas Grotesk: clean, tightly spaced letters with a large x-height and horizontal cuts at the ends of strokes.
In 1960, Haas's German parent company, Stempel, renamed the face Helvetica, from Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland, to make it more marketable internationally. The name tapped into the prestige of the 'Swiss Style' of graphic design, which prized grids, objectivity and clarity.
Helvetica's appeal lay in its apparent neutrality: it seemed to carry the message without adding a voice of its own. Corporations adopted it widely in the 1960s and 70s, and it appeared on transport signage, public information and the logos of many famous brands. Its ubiquity made it a subject of debate; to some designers it represented clarity and modernity, to others bland corporate conformity.
Gary Hustwit's 2007 documentary Helvetica made the typeface a minor celebrity, the rare font with its own film. Apple used a Helvetica variant as the system font on the iPhone for years before switching to its own San Francisco typeface in 2015. Whether you love it or find it dull, you almost certainly read it today.
Source: Wikipedia — Helvetica · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
