A love letter to Helvetica

There are typefaces you love and typefaces you respect. Helvetica sits in the second column.

This is a harder letter to write than the others. Helvetica has been praised into invisibility. It is on your train ticket, your tax return, your airline logo, and the sign above the door at half the businesses on your high street. Writing a glowing love letter to Helvetica is a bit like writing one to oxygen. Nobody needs the reassurance.

So this is complicated affection. Grateful it exists. Suspicious of anyone who picks it without thinking.

The man who made it

Max Miedinger was a Swiss typeface designer working at the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, outside Basel. In 1957, Eduard Hoffmann, the director of Haas, asked him to update Akzidenz-Grotesk, the Berthold sans-serif from 1898 that had been the default workhorse of Swiss and German commercial printing for decades. Akzidenz was a good typeface. By the 1950s it was starting to feel a little dated, a little uneven across its weights, a little nineteenth-century in a world that was becoming something else.

Miedinger drew what was originally called Neue Haas Grotesk. It kept the bones of Akzidenz but regularised them, tightened them, made them more consistent. The x-height went up. The terminals were cleaned. The contrast between letters was evened out. It felt purpose-built for the rising Swiss graphic design of the period, the International Typographic Style, with its grids, its asymmetric hierarchies, and its conviction that clarity was the highest typographic virtue.

In 1960, when Haas licensed the typeface to D. Stempel AG and Linotype for wider international distribution, Neue Haas Grotesk was renamed Helvetica, from the Latin for Swiss. The rename was a marketing decision. Neue Haas Grotesk did not travel. Helvetica did.

The other major neo-grotesque of the same year, Univers, was drawn by Adrian Frutiger for Deberny and Peignot. The two are often discussed together because they were solving the same problem at the same moment with different instincts. Univers is more systematic, more humanist in its proportions, more consciously designed as a family. Helvetica is tighter, more uniform, more industrial. History picked Helvetica.

What the letters actually do

If you want to understand Helvetica as a shape rather than as a logo, look at the lowercase a, c, e, and s.

Helvetica has what typographers call closed apertures. The opening in the c, the terminal of the e, the curl of the s: all pulled tight toward the body of the letter rather than opening outward. The terminals are cut horizontally, flat, not angled. The strokes are nearly uniform in thickness. The spacing is tight. The x-height is very high, which is what makes it readable at small sizes on business cards and subway tile.

Those closed apertures are the thing. They are what gives Helvetica its slightly stuffy, enclosed, rationalist feel. They are also, paradoxically, what makes it less legible than you might assume at sign distances. A letter with open apertures, like those in Frutiger or Johnston Sans or Myriad, stays more distinct when you squint at it from across a platform. Helvetica's letters get a little more alike when your eyes are tired. This is why transport systems that actually care about wayfinding legibility, London Underground for instance, do not use it.

Set a paragraph of Helvetica, step back, and the block has an almost architectural quality. Very flat, very even, very grey. Whether that is a feature or a flaw depends on what you are trying to say.

Where it actually went

Helvetica became the default corporate typeface of the 1960s and 1970s because it arrived at exactly the moment large institutions were professionalising their visual identities. American corporations were hiring European designers. European designers had Swiss Style in their bones. Helvetica was the Swiss Style in typeface form. A whole generation of logos and wayfinding systems were set in it because Helvetica meant modern, rational, international, serious.

Massimo Vignelli used it for the 1967 American Airlines logo, which stayed in service until 2013. Vignelli also used it for his 1972 New York City Subway signage standards manual, although the actual signs at the time were set in Standard Medium, a close Akzidenz-Grotesk relative. The MTA formally switched to Helvetica for subway signage in 1989. Jeep, The North Face, American Apparel, Target: all of them use a Helvetica-based wordmark. Through the 1990s and 2000s it was the default sans-serif in word processors, on websites, and on early Apple operating systems. The early Macintosh shipped with Helvetica. Windows shipped Arial, a Monotype typeface from 1982 designed to be metrically compatible with Helvetica but legally distinct, which is a polite way of describing what Arial actually is.

If you have used a computer in the last forty years, you have read more Helvetica than almost any other typeface. You just have not noticed, because that is what Helvetica is for.

Neue Helvetica and Helvetica Now

The typeface has been reworked twice in ways worth knowing.

Neue Helvetica, released in 1983 by D. Stempel AG, was the first comprehensive overhaul. It consolidated the scattered weights of the original into a single coherent family of 51 variants, using a two-digit numerical naming system borrowed from Univers. The first digit is weight, the second is width and style. Neue Helvetica 55 Roman is the regular. Neue Helvetica 75 Bold is heavier. Neue Helvetica 67 Medium Condensed is narrower. This is the version most designers used through the 1990s and 2000s.

Helvetica Now, released by Monotype in 2019, is the most significant revival. It ships in three optical sizes, micro, text, and display, and the letterforms change between them. Micro opens the apertures slightly and loosens the spacing for tiny sizes where the original collapses into illegibility. Display tightens everything back in for large headline use. Text sits between. This is the version you reach for now if you want Helvetica to actually perform.

Helvetica Now is the honest acknowledgment that the original was never as universal as its reputation suggested. The same shapes do not work at every size. They never did.

The documentary

In 2007, for the typeface's fiftieth anniversary, Gary Hustwit released Helvetica, an 80-minute documentary interviewing type designers, graphic designers, and critics. It was the first feature-length documentary about a typeface, and it did more than anything else to cement Helvetica's place in popular culture as the typeface that people who do not know about typefaces have heard of.

The film is genuinely good because it takes the argument seriously from both sides. Vignelli defends Helvetica as a rational, disciplined tool that disappears in service of the content. Erik Spiekermann argues that its ubiquity is a failure of imagination, that designers reach for it because it is safe, that a typeface communicating nothing specific is not neutral, it is absent. Both of them are right.

If you only watch one thing about type, watch Helvetica.

Why people keep defending it

At small sizes on a clean background with generous leading, Helvetica works. Not brilliantly, but competently. Its blandness means it rarely clashes with what it sets. You can drop it into almost any design and it will not fight the photography, the illustration, or the layout. For a brand that wants to say "we are competent and predictable and serious," Helvetica says exactly that.

The problem is that many brands want to say more than that and reach for Helvetica anyway, because Helvetica is what they have always seen. The typeface is not the problem. The defaulting is.

Used by someone who knows what they are doing, the way Vignelli used it on American Airlines, Helvetica becomes a statement. Used by someone who wanted a safe choice, it becomes wallpaper. The typeface is blameless either way. It does what it was designed to do.

What I actually think

Helvetica is the typeface of "I have not decided yet." It stands in for intentional design more often than it represents it. That is not a criticism of the typeface. It is a criticism of how it gets used.

When I set Helvetica, I try to treat it as a decision, not a default. If I am reaching for it out of habit, I stop and pick something else. If I am reaching for it because nothing else does this specific flat, rationalist, even-textured thing, I use it, and I use it properly: Helvetica Now, at the right optical size, with the spacing respected.

The honest feeling is this. I am grateful it exists. Miedinger did a remarkable job. The 1983 family and the 2019 revival are both genuine improvements. Vignelli's American Airlines logo is still one of the finest pieces of typographic identity work of the twentieth century.

And the next time someone asks me which typeface to use for their brand, I will probably suggest something else first, and if they insist, I will ask why.

Respect more than love. Both real.