Why do we need HELVETICA 2nd Edition

WHY DO
WE
NEED
HELVETICA

09
WHY DO WE NEED
HELVETICA?
08
HELVETICA’S
HISTORY
14
20
THE TREND OF
GLOBALIZATION
CONTINUES
20
THE
MULTINATIONALS ’
TYPEFACE
22
24
WORLDWIDE
SUCCESS
24
WHY DO WE NEED
HELVETICA?
2 nd EDITION
2010 / 2015
A PLAGUE
BY THE NAME
OF ARIAL
26
ORIGINAL
Heitlinger, Paulo
“Para que é que precisamos da Helvetica?”
Cadernos da Tipografia, Nr. 1
Tipografos.net
Mar. 2007
DESIGN, CONCEPT
& TRANSLATION
Carlos Gaspar
28
THE ANSWER
A MESSAGE
TO PAULO
HEITLINGER
28
32

09
WHY DO
WE
NEED
HEL-
VETICA?
LET’S
SEE WHY
The 50th anniversary of Helvetica - a font family
created in 1957 by Swiss Max Miedinger - was
the excuse to shoot a documentary that illustrates
the expansion of this well-known typeface.
HELVETICAFILM
Helvetica metal type
(with Manfred Schulz)
http://www.helveticafilm.com/media/
It reignites a controversy that goes back some
years ago and which is worth resuming.
8
WHY DO WE NEED HELVETICA?

11
When the
Swiss publisher
LARS
MULLER
Slightly bigger than a Helvetic
(Swiss) passport and (...) with
a red cover, a H instead of the
white cross, this little book
brings together hundreds
of photos to illustrate the ubiquity of this type,
used for both logos of multinationals such as
Panasonic, Texaco,Samsung, Hoover, Lufthansa,
Kawasaki, Evian, Agip, BMW and Caterpillar,
as well as for urban signage systems, from
Hong-Kong to Istambul.
published his book
HOMMAGE
TO A
TYPEFACE,
argued that:
“ THIS TYPEFACE
CAN DO EVERYTHING,
AND THAT IS WHY
IT’S SO GREAT (...)
I wanted to publish this book to counteract
the inflation of typefaces. We now have nearly
30,000 typefaces, that don’t serve much. Rather
than invent new typefaces, it would be better
to renew typography with existing typefaces.
This is the way that points to the success of Helvetica.”
10 WHY DO WE NEED HELVETICA?

13
IN RESPONSE
TO LARS MÜLLER
I must argue that for a swiss native,
Helvetica can serve for many applications,
but for me it doesn’t serve as much since
it lacks a typographical personality.
WHY DO WE STILL
NEED THIS TYPEFACE
WITH SUCH
A HORRIFYING
AESTHETICS, (...)
“DEPERSONALIZED”,
“NEUTRAL”
We have thousands of fonts available for
several distinctive applications, so the
relevant question is:
Why do we still need this typeface with such
a horrifying aesthetics, created in the fiftys
to attend the needs of customers looking
for a typeface “depersonalized”, “neutral”,
able to guarantee them an easy access to
a global market?
HELVETICA ARTWORK
by Roberto Blake
http://robertoblake.com/blog/2009/11/
typography-i-do-love-helvetica/
12
WHY DO WE NEED HELVETICA?

15
Helvetica is the most
associated typeface
with swiss typography
from the post-war and
the “International
School”, because
of its chronic lack
of personality.
IT APPEARED IN THE ‘50s,
DURING THE RECOVERY
OF THE ECONOMIC
CONJUNCTURE
AFTER WORLD
WAR II.
Many German and Swiss companies,
eager to launch new international
markets, needed a clear, neutral,
modern and global typeface, which
could relate itself with all countries
and cultures - with the characteristics
of Switzerland.
HELVETICA’S
HISTORY
Especially in the german afterwar,
where a neutral typeface was
sought, and which didn’t recall the
country’s shameful Nazi past, now
“democratized”, and looking more
than ever to overcome it as soon as
possible. The elected type, chosen
by the multinational companies
was Helvetica, the font of the
globalization of the ‘60s and ‘70s
(and, as we shall see, also of the
twenty-first century).
THE IMPORTANT THING
WAS TO MAKE IT
“MODERN” WITHOUT
REFLECTING SOME
SORT OF A NATIONAL
ASSOCIATION, OR
ANY SPECIFIC
CULTURAL
AFFILIATION.
14
WHY DO WE NEED HELVETICA?

17
“
FIT
MAY A
UNIVERSAL
TYPEFACE
COME! ”
FOR ALL
APPLICATIONS, ALL
PURPOSES, ALL
LANGUAGES AND
ALL CULTURES.
DURING
THE ‘20s
AND ‘30s
IT HAD BEEN
THE BAUHAUS
SUPPORTERS
WHO WHERE
DEMANDING
FOR A
UNIVERSAL
TYPEFACE
At that time, the claims
of the vangardists caused
little resonance; much
later, after the war, the
industry and commerce
had finally gotten the
message, and demanded:
“May a universal typeface
come!”
It started to be commercialized as
Neue Haas Grotesk, since it was a
reformulation of Haas Grotesk (owned
by the Haas foundry, the company that
commissioned Max Miedinger the typeface
modernization).
HELVETICA WAS
DESIGNED TO
BE A MODERNIZED
VERSION OF AKZI
DENZ-GROTESK
(owned by H.
Berthold AG)
THE FIRST VERSION
WAS PRESENTED
IN 1957, AT THE
GRAPHIC ‘57 FAIR,
HELD IN LAUSANNE
This typeface, then called Helvetia was
marketed alongside the famous Univers, by Adrian Frutiger. Shortly
thereafter, the German foundry D. Stempel AG purchased the rights
of Helvetia and added various weights and degrees of condensation,
rebaptizing and relaunching as Helvetica in 1961.
At that time, already 50% of D. Stempel AG’s capital was in possession
of Linotype AG, representing, within the Linotype’s goup, “the metalic
type foundry” sector for traditional and manual composition -
the fotocomposition had begun around the year 1955.
During its birth, helvetica didn’t have a
structural concept as Adrian Frutiger cleverly
gave to Univers, when he invented a
system to calibrate the numerical weights
and degrees of condensation / expansion.
This lack of systematic, reflected in the
poor aesthetics of the variants, which
made it a requirement to redesign it, like
it happened in 1980 as Neue Helvetica.
16
WHY DO WE NEED HELVETICA?

19
‘ CAUSE THEY SAY
EVERYTHING
LOOKS WAY WAY
BETTER
IN HELVETICA
COWS

21
THE
TREND
OF
GLOBALIZATION
CONTINUES
IN THE
XXI CENTURY,
HELVETICA
CONTINUES
TO BE USED,
THROUGH
A PERSISTENT
REVIVAL THAT HAS
BEEN AFFLICTING US
FOR YEARS.
TANK
Helvetica, Moleskine.
© 2009 Jim Antonopoulos
http://www.tankstudio.com.au/blog/?tag=helvetica
THE ANSWER,
THOUGH I DON’T LIKE IT,
IS SIMPLE...
The renowned canadian designer and critic
Nick Shinn, denouncing the evil effects of
the authority of mass fashion, wrote:
“ Helvetica returned at large. On the street,
we see it in advertising campaigns for
companies as diverse as IBM and The Gap.
In online sales, it’s always on the top of the
list as the most sold typeface...“
The font that the type designer and writer Nick
Shinn rightly nicknames as face of uniformity,
has come to occupy positions for which it was
never conceived, but contemporary designers,
afraid to assert their cultural roots and regional
contexts, prefer the “typeface without
personality“. Never has a typeface so barren,
with such a poor readability and aesthetics,
had a virulent proliferation - adverse effects of
globalization on principles of the XXI century...
20
WHY DO WE NEED HELVETICA?
Don’t miss Nick Shinn’s article at: www.shinntype.com/stories/uniformity.pdf

23
THE
MULTI-
NATIONALS’
TYPEFACE
HELVETICAFILM
London streets
FROM THE
1960’S, MANY
INTERNATIONAL
COMPANIES
HAVE ADOPTED
HELVETICA FOR ITS
COMMUNICATION...
http://www.helveticafilm.com/media/
Lufthansa, advised by Otl Aicher, adopt it as the
corporate’s typeface. KLM, the American Airlines
and other airlines followed this trend. Then came
BASF, a chemical pharmaceutical consortium
which in that time, already occupied about 300
printing workshops around the globe, as well
as numerous advertising agencies. Even the
consortia Bayer and Hoechst, two other giants
of the chemical industry, started to use Helvetica
anywhere in the world where there was business.
In the automotive sector, it was followed by Opel
and then BMW, which now uses a font similar
to Helvetica. MAN and AEG also opted for the
“type without characteristics”.
Decidedly, the omnipresent Helvetica has become
labeled as “modern, progressive, cosmopolitan
and international”. But in reality, it continued to
be of poor aesthetics, quietly bourgeois, stridently
annoying, charmless, without elegance - failing
of any temperament, vitality and emotion.
Therefore, Helvetica was the winner of the International
Style, and preferred by the masters of
graphic design, as the swiss Max Bill and Josef
Müller-Brockmann. Past 45 years after its introduction,
Linotype already lists around 115 different
Helvetica familly members on the market today...
a long tipographic yawn.
22
WHY DO WE NEED HELVETICA?

25
DUST TOKY JAPAN
by 4funz
http://4funz.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/
hq-japan-wallpapers/dusk-tokyo-japan/
Despite these obstacles, Helvetica has been the most successful and most widely used
typeface of the 60’s and 70’s. It quickly replaced, in 1897, Old Akzidenz Grotesk, which in
the playful words of Erik Spiekermann, was showing "a lot of wrinkles". Their lack of a
national and regional character - that’s why it’s called the “typeface without character” -
was sometimes offset by the use of color, like in advertising posters. Moreover, the creative
imagination of those who chose helvetica, was reduced markedly to explore geometric
shapes, diagonal angles and / or take advantage of the wide range of weights and cuts of
the letter that became the universal typeface of the second half of the twentieth century.
24
WHY DO WE NEED HELVETICA?

A
HELVETICA
HAS BEEN
VIOLENTLY
PIRATED
- ANOTHER
EXPRESSION
OF ITS UBIQUITY
AND POPULARITY.
SCOURGE
CALLED
Those who didn’t want to invest in
the original product, bought one
of the multiple clones, for much
cheaper: even worse copies than
the original, called ‘Swiss’, ‘Geneve’,
‘Zürich’, etc.
R
I
FROM BAD
TO WORSE,
the degradation continued when
the still young Microsoft, decided
to avoid purchasing Helvetica, and
commissioned in 1982, the Arial
typeface to Monotype. Included in
the package of the operating system
as one of the Windows core,
A
L
ARIAL, IS ANOTHER TYPEFACE
OF UNPARALLELED BANALITY,
AND CAN BE UGLIER THAN
THE ORIGINAL.
HOWEVER,
even Microsoft has already noticed
this, and in its new version of Windows,
both Arial and Times are no longer
part of the core fonts...
27
26
WHY DO WE NEED HELVETICA?

OR
OTHING
FINALLY, TO ANSWER
THE QUESTION POSED
IN THE TITLE
OF THIS ARTICLE:
29
28

BY THE WAY

In 1994, Albert-Jan Pool and Erik
Spiekermann took a cab together
from the ATypI conference to the
San Francisco airport. Spiekermann
knew that Pool’s employer went bust,
so he told him that if he wanted to
earn some money with type design,
he should have a look at fonts such
as OCR and DIN. Spiekermann saw
the old DIN type-face on the market
in two weights and noticed that
several designers began using it.
He thought:
“why is this happening?”
These were leading designers, he saw
them going on and he thought:
“Hm, we should do something about
it. Why do they use this unusable
typeface? Let’s ask someone who
can make something useful out of it.
Then it might work even better.”
So, he invited Pool to Berlin to discuss
the idea in detail.
One year later, FontFont published
Pool’s typeface FF OCR-F, followed
by the family FF DIN. Spiekermann
had the skill to point out an empty
space in the market. Digital DIN fonts
were available at that time, however,
only in two weights and solely in pure
geometric shape. Pool designed a
family of five weights, he added true
italics and also some alternative
characters, such as the “i” with a
round dot and the lower case figures.
With time, five weights of DIN Condensed
were added, as well as Greek
and Cyrillic versions. The shape of the
new FF DIN differs from the original
mostly by thinner horizontal strokes
and by more fluent curves.
Despite its primitive, technical look
and the clear reference to the German
motorway signboards, FF DIN became
a phenomenon. The typeface has even
pervaded book and magazine typography,
and found its place in posters
of cultural institutions.
PAULO HEITLINGER
WOULD
LOVE TO READ
THIS WORK
ABOUT HELVETICA
DRESSED WITH
DIN TYPEFACE
OR...
MAYBE
NOT
in: http://dinfont.com/story/