It is dry, passionless and, in most weights, severe. Whether Helvetica is good or bad for a particular project depends on the project. Myriad and Futura are also large families, and I use both, but the mega-families are even answer is spot on. As a designer, I always try to err on the side of too large a family rather than too small when I'm choosing a typeface, if it's one that will be used in a large range of contexts over a long period of time. The size of the family - the number of available weights and widths - is also a factor in the choice of a typeface for a corporate identity, because it allows text to speak with many voices without breaking harmony. Once DTP took off, however, Helvetica had a definite edge. In pre-DTP days, other large sans-serif type families such as Univers were just as popular as Helvetica for corporate work. Designers took to DTP like ducks to water, and brought Helvetica with them. They were "free," since they came with the hardware, which conventional type certainly was not. Postscript hinting made them look good at the low 300 dpi resolution available at the time. Helvetica and Times Roman were the very first licensed, digitized typefaces. You couldn't change a chair, a rug, or the position of a table, without things looking uncomfortably out of place.Īnother chapter in the Helvetica story came with the first Apple laser printer and Adobe Postscript. It eventually fell out of favor, ironically, for the same reason: a Robert Adam dining room was so exactly proportioned and symmetrical that there was no way to modify it without "breaking" it. It was also part of a cultural rejection of over-ornate design (Rococo), founded in the rediscovery of the proportionality and harmony of ancient Greek buildings. Neo-classical architecture and design gained tremendous popularity 18th Century for its symmetry and serene harmony.
Helvetica doesn't take kindly to tweaking.Īn example from a different era might help put things in context.
This precision is much of what designers love about Helvetica, and also much of what they hate, because with precision comes inflexibility. Precision conveys dependability, a conservative culture, authority, control so the association with corporate identities, in hindsight, was probably inevitable. Precision is terrific in the context of corporate communications, word marks and logotypes, much in the way that Greek columns and massive stonework are useful in the context of bank and government architecture. Helvetica is tremendously precise, as befits a Swiss-made typeface, and is in many ways the ultimate expression of the grotesk style. If you wanted to look modern, simplicity was the watchword. The grotesks in general arrived on the typographic scene at a time when Western culture was rejecting the ornate styles of the late 19th Century across all fields of design, including architecture and fashion.
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Typefaces become popular for a number of reasons, partly technology (which often drives fashion - "Because I can" is a more potent driver than most people realize), partly the cultural milieu within which they fit and become associated, partly the mood they invoke (or don't).