Helvetica Turns 60: How a Typeface Became Part of Everyday Life

From industrialization to commercial globalization, from the age of metal type to the age of digital typesetting — why has Helvetica stayed alive all this time?

"When you don't know what typeface to use, use Helvetica."

The line circulates widely among graphic designers. It is a joke, of course, but it also sums up how much of the world Helvetica fits into.

In May 2010, the New York type designer Cyrus Highsmith ran an experiment: how to get through a day without Helvetica, the rule being to avoid every occasion where Helvetica appeared. It did not look like much of a challenge at first. That day, he could barely move.

He knew to stay off the internet. He even deleted Helvetica from his computer, and told himself not to ride the New York subway or the buses, because the signs in subway and bus stations all use Helvetica. Brands he knew used Helvetica went onto the day's off-limits list too.

But Helvetica turned up far more often than he had guessed.

The care labels on most of his clothes, the yogurt cup he ate for breakfast, the stock pages of The New York Times, his TV remote — all Helvetica. So he dug through his closet for an old T-shirt and a pair of army trousers, gave up the yogurt for fruit, and skipped television that evening in favor of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, printed in Electra.

Out shopping, he found Helvetica on his credit card and on his dollar bills as well. He felt he was living in an age the typeface ruled.

As Michael Bierut, a partner at Pentagram, put it: "No matter where you look, you always see typefaces of every kind. But one of them you probably see more than any other: Helvetica. They are simply there, as though they had always been part of the environment — like air, or gravity."

It has become the default typeface for countless occasions, and people have written books and shot documentaries about how it took over the world. This year is Helvetica's 60th, and the Spanish studio Husmee, working with the paper company Arjowiggins, asked 19 graphic designers to make a series of posters in tribute.

So why this typeface in particular? Why did it take the market so fast when it appeared, and why has it stayed fresh for 60 years?

It did not pioneer sans-serif type, but it won the market the moment it appeared

First, the difference between serif and sans-serif type, the two great families of Western letterforms. Times New Roman, the face we all use for term papers, is a serif type; Helvetica is the model sans-serif. The distinction lies in the decorative detail at the end of each stroke. Put plainly, every stroke in a serif face ends in a little tail, while the strokes of a sans-serif face end bare, with no ornament at all.

Sans-serif type appeared as early as the first years of the 19th century. At first people took it for a clumsy reworking of serif type, an ugly duckling used mainly by sign painters and stonemasons.

But as industrialization spread, sans-serif type was used far more often. The classical serif faces, which now looked stale and old-fashioned, no longer suited the needs of advertising, because sans-serif letters were easier to draw and to set.

Not until a century later, when the Bauhaus movement that began in Germany swept across Europe and then reached the United States, did sans-serif type — with its insistence on clear purpose and effective communication — start to carry real weight in society.

The most popular sans-serif of the first half of the 20th century was Akzidenz Grotesk, made by the Berlin type foundry H. Berthold AG. It was a huge commercial success and a favorite in design circles, and graphic designers recommended it to publishers and printers one after another.

Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei AG, the company that would later release Helvetica, had made a sans-serif of its own in 1943, Normal Grotesk, which held a respectable share of the market after the Second World War. Plenty of smaller companies saw the same potential and tried to take a piece of it.

Helvetica, in other words, did not arrive as a pioneer. It faced not an empty market but a crowded and fiercely competitive one.

To protect his company's share, Eduard Hoffmann, the general manager of Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei AG, brought in the designer Max Miedinger to draw a new typeface. After consulting widely in the trade, Hoffmann was convinced that a completely plain face, with no ornament whatever, would win designers over, and might become the standard typeface for the printed advertising of large companies.

In June 1957, Helvetica — whose earliest version was called New Haas Grotesk — was released to the public at the "Graphic 57" fair in Lucerne.

Hoffmann then spent most of his energy persuading the advertising departments of Basel's chemical giants to take it up. He hired heavyweight graphic and typographic designers to make advertising leaflets and product brochures for Helvetica alone. The printing trade took to it, and the order book at Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei AG filled up.

A year and a half after its release, it was already the strongest rival to Akzidenz Grotesk, then the reigning sans-serif.

The birth of Helvetica: from the Bauhaus to Swiss International Style

Helvetica was born in Switzerland after the Second World War.

Postwar Europe needed rebuilding, and graphic design went through a short stall. By the 1950s a new style had begun to surface in West Germany and Switzerland, one that valued cleanliness, objectivity, legibility, a simple and definite look, and the precise delivery of function. It spread around the world quickly, and came to be called the International Typographic Style.

The roots of that style run in a straight line from the modernist design movement. Two key figures in it, Theo Ballmer and Max Bill, were Swiss graphic designers who had trained at the Bauhaus.

Helvetica's birth, growth and wide adoption answered modern design's demand for a more neutral sans-serif, which makes it a typical product of the International Style. It caught the golden age of Swiss typography, and it was born into a Europe that had just been through political reform and was entering a period of fast economic growth. One account holds that Helvetica's success was rooted precisely in that pragmatism.

It looks like a typeface with no style and nothing to do with feeling: plain, blunt, clear. That was exactly what Eduard Hoffmann and Max Miedinger set out to make — they threw out distinctive, individual letterforms and took a simpler, plainer, quieter road. Neither man was trying to project an international outlook, and neither forced a set of values onto it. It merely stated, accurately, the core of the Swiss spirit: neutrality.

From airlines to tech giants, from multinationals to corner shops, Helvetica is everyone's first choice

A typeface is finally tested by its use in the world. It was as the commercial world warmed to it that Helvetica was pushed, step by step, out of Switzerland into the rest of Europe, then to the United States, then everywhere.

Otl Aicher, one of the most influential German designers of the 20th century, was the first to see what Helvetica could do. In 1962, he and Development Group 5 at the Ulm School of Design chose it for a new visual identity for Lufthansa. It was the first time a company had made Helvetica its official corporate typeface.

American Airlines, British Airways and European carriers followed Aicher's lead and took up Helvetica — perhaps because it looks safe and trustworthy, which is the most basic thing passengers want from an airline.

Beyond the airlines, a great many multinationals embraced Helvetica so warmly that they effectively turned a Swiss typeface into a global one, and carried it to success in markets everywhere.

Tech giants such as Apple, Microsoft and Intel; carmakers such as BMW and Toyota; and household names such as Nestlé infant formula, Coca-Cola, BASF, 3M, Motorola, Samsung and Panasonic — all of them are on Helvetica's list.

These companies prized its neutrality. It fits any setting, rarely collides with a local culture inside a globalized system, and meets a multinational's outward and inward needs at once.

Worth noting, though, is that all this corporate favor never pinned a luxury label on Helvetica. It could run in the advertising of multinationals and suit every sort of high-end brand, and it also showed up regularly on the flyers of local fast-food joints, barbershops and grill houses. It is used just as widely by small business.

After all, in advertising or a brochure of any kind, a typeface is only a carrier of content. Its largest task is to deliver information and let people read in comfort. Helvetica is exactly that competent player who never steals the scene.

Some compare it to blue jeans, others to Coca-Cola. Either way, the comparisons show how popular Helvetica is with ordinary people, and bear out the democratic, egalitarian values it embodies. It presents an all-purpose face, fit for anyone and anything. The clearest proof may be how many companies choose Helvetica for their logos: its direct, clear shapes suit functional symbols of every kind, and work on buildings and public facilities.

Fashion does not touch it

Countless trends have blazed and gone out. Helvetica is one of the rare things that has taken part in the popular culture of every era.

That is the advantage neutrality gives it. As the Dutch modernist designer Wim Crouwel said: "Neutralism is a word we love. A typeface itself should carry no meaning; meaning should come from the content of the text, not from the look of the letters. That is exactly why we love Helvetica so much."

It is popular in markets around the world, widely used in image-making, wordmarks, posters, advertising and books. But pay attention and you may notice that almost nobody calls Helvetica perfect.

It is not perfect. Type "I hate Helvetica" into Google and you will find long essays arguing the case against it.

Here is an odd episode. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Helvetica showed up so relentlessly in public space that many designers deliberately stopped using it, trying to break out of a dull, rigid, flattening pattern. Faces that looked less regimented and less formal — Frutiger, Rotis and Meta — briefly replaced it in advertising and official identity work. By the mid-1990s, designers' liking and trust for Helvetica had settled back at a fairly steady level.

For a designer, Helvetica is an extremely useful tool. Its disciplined, restrained letterforms leave designers enough freedom to say what they mean. It was drawn for everyday use, it is stable, and it stands for the feeling of the ordinary.

Helvetica appeared in the mid-1950s, at the very end of the age of metal type. Perhaps because it made its name so fast, it was not scrapped in the technological revolutions that followed in the printing trade, and it survived the arrival of phototypesetting in the mid-1960s. When digital typesetting took the stage in the late 1980s, Helvetica was still going strong.

From industrialization to commercial globalization, from the age of metal type to the age of digital typesetting — why has Helvetica stayed alive all this time? A sentence in a 1964 issue of the trade magazine Graphia may be the answer: Helvetica looks stable and balanced, which keeps it from looking too fashionable and from looking too dated. That met everything printers and graphic designers wanted from a sans-serif.

The United States was Helvetica's biggest champion — the Swiss typeface went global from America

In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art in New York put on a show for Helvetica's 50th anniversary, using the exhibits to show how far the typeface had soaked into American daily life.

In Helvetica, the documentary released the same year, the designer Michael Bierut described what it was like when the typeface first reached the American market.

American media at the time was full of loose, quirky hand-lettering set against garish line drawings. Then one company dropped that vulgar fashion and switched to a plain white, minimal envelope carrying a single word in Helvetica: Widgco. "Can you imagine how thrilling that was? It was like crawling across a desert with your mouth full of dirty grit, and someone handing you a glass of clear ice water — it was wonderful," Bierut said.

Slowly, the typeface caught on first among designers in Chicago and at MIT, then among designers in New York. Not until 1969 did Americans really grasp how universal Helvetica was.

A number of US government agencies found that it gave off a reliable sense of safety and trust, and began using it as their official typeface.

American Airlines, whose logo is set in Helvetica, went 50 years without changing it.

In New York, Helvetica is the official signage typeface of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's subway system. The subways and transit systems of Washington and Boston use it too.

Even at Apple, where Steve Jobs pushed for type design in house, Helvetica Neue was for years the system font of choice on iOS and the Mac. As iPhones, iPads and Macs sold around the world, it became a daily fixture in people's hands.

Promotion by multinationals like Apple was the best help Helvetica had in widening its market, and riding the tailwind of commercial globalization, it came into bloom everywhere.

Cover image source: Creative Review