Typography: The Role of Helvetica | GDT Week 2 - Post 1

SOME THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TYPOGRAPHY

The art and technique of arranging type is called typography. Types can be letters, numbers, symbols, and even characters. These are used to make written language legible, readable, and aesthetically appealing.

For years from the past, typography has always been used in all forms of printed and digital communication. It's in books, newspapers, magazines, websites, signage, and much more.

Typography itself has become the subject of debate and the reasons behind this are:

• Aesthetic preferences: what someone might find as a well-designed typeface, others might see it as less appealing, or less appropriate. Typography involves a lot of design choices.
• Historical and Cultural context: typography choices can carry historical and cultural significance. The use of certain typefaces might be associated with certain historical periods. These can be for good or bad. For example, in the Nazi Germany period, one of the typefaces used in their propaganda was a gothic typeface called Fraktur. Many official Nazi documents employed this font, even Hitler’s famous book “Mein Kampf” cover was written in a hand-drawn version of Fraktur. After that period, not many people wanted to see that typeface in use anymore because it's associated with a dark period.
• Accessibility: typography has to be accessible to all people, including those with visual impairments. For example, a low-contrast text can cause debate and be cataloged as a hard-to-read typeface.
• Branding: typography plays a huge role in a brand's visual identity. It helps build how the brand is going to be perceived by the public. For example, a clothing brand, with the typeface they use, the brand can be perceived as elegant, urban, etc.
• Copyright: certain typefaces and fonts can raise debates because of the legality and ethics of the font usage.

Because a single typeface can evoke so much and create either a peaceful atmosphere or a chaotic one, you must take into consideration some aspects before defining the ultimate choice. Every typeface has a personality, you can choose between a serif, old world, modern, or other typefaces. A typeface has different fonts, e.g., light, bold, or condensed, these determine the emphasis you put in a text. The color you pick is going to express a feeling, like red can express passion or love, and black can express mystery or elegance. The size of the text can indicate importance and how you place your text, with images and other elements, all can affect the reader's emotional response, e.g., you can evoke harmony or confusion.

THE HISTORY OF HELVETICA

Recently I watched “Helvetica”, a 2007 documentary film by Gary Hustwit, an American filmmaker and photographer. This film talks about how much Helvetica impacted the visual world.

Helvetica is first described as a timeless, ubiquitous thing.

Helvetica is a sans-serif typeface which was born in 1957. Eduard Hoffman who was the director of the Hass Type Foundry in Switzerland, established the foundry as the center of the Swiss movement in the design of typefaces. He wanted a modernized version of the German typeface Akzidenz Grotesk. He directed Max Miedinger (who was a designer at Hass but worked in a different department at the time), and Miedinger created the drawings of Helvetica.

The Hass Type Foundry was owned by the Stemple Type Foundry, and both were owned by Linotype Company (American). Helvetica was originally called Neue Haas Grotesk, but Stemple wanted to change the name because it didn’t sound well to be sold to America. The name Helvetia which means "Swiss" in Latin, was the second option but “you cannot name a typography after a country”, someone said. So, the name Helvetica was suggested, which is the Latin for “the Swiss typeface”, as the Swiss were well known for their typefaces, and their attention to detail. Since the 1960s that’s been the name of one of the most popular typefaces.

Haas Type Foundry in Switzerland

Massimo Vignelli (a renowned Italian graphic designer) once said that the life of a designer is a life of fight, fight against ugliness.

Between the '50s and '60s, in the Modernism Period, designers were looking for typefaces with better legibility, and cleanness, they wanted loud but clear, and modern typefaces. They were looking for Helvetica.

A typography is the white part of the background, it is the spaces between the black that makes it. With Helvetica, the interrelationship of the negative shape was well executed. The Swiss paid more attention to the background than to any other detail. Helvetica was created firm, not bent to shape.

It was used by airlines, fashion brands, magazines, street signage, and more. Big corporations made use of Helvetica too because it made them seem neutral, efficient, human, accessible, transparent, and accountable, even if they were not. 

A good example of the use of Helvetica is the redesign of the American Airlines brand. They got the best to represent America, two words united together, using the colors of the nation, and written in Helvetica.

1967

Other brands using Helvetica

Vignelli was one of the people who popularized the use of Helvetica. He had very strict ideas about how a typography should be, he didn’t agree with the idea that the typeface itself should be expressive, but to express with the typeface.

Wim Crouwel (a renowned Dutch graphic designer) also known as Gridnik, said “the meaning is in the content of the text and not in the typeface, and that is why we loved Helvetica very much”.

For Matthew Carter (a British type designer), the most beautiful thing about Helvetica was the horizontal terminals in the lowercase a, c, e, and g. The structure was based on the horizontal slicing off of the terminal.

With the start of postmodernism (which was a period of vivid colors, theatricality, and exaggeration) new problems surfaced and new solutions were needed. Helvetica seemed to not have room in the world anymore.

Now, designers wanted to express subjectivity, they wanted to present their feelings through design, and Helvetica didn’t provide a way. It was an overused typeface, and it didn't stand out. 

Postmodernism produced things with more vitality, different, rebellious, and exciting. 

The typeface that in modernism was a lifesaver, in postmodernism was seen as a global monster. Good or bad, Helvetica will always be a big part of graphic design history.

Did you know that typography could cause that much impact?

-

-

-

Sources of information:

🔎 https://www.amazon.com/Helvetica-David-Carson/dp/B079N3L3KT

🔎 https://alphahistory.com/pastpeculiar/1941-nazis-ban-jewish-fonts/