LONDON — Question: What do American Airlines, American Apparel, Comme des Garçons, Evian, Intel, Lufthansa, Nestlé and Toyota have in common?
Answer: They all use the same typeface in their corporate identities - Helvetica. You can also spot that font on the flags fluttering from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' trucks, the album sleeve of John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," and all of the signage on the New York subway system.
It has now been 50 years since Helvetica was introduced. Even if you've never heard its name before, you would be bound to recognize the typeface, because you'll have seen it so often without knowing. We live in such a bloated visual culture that a typical Western consumer is said to see - as opposed to actually notice - more than 3,000 corporate messages every day, and many of them are printed in Helvetica.
Helvetica plays such an important part in our lives that the Museum of Modern Art in New York is celebrating its 50th anniversary by acquiring a set of the original lead type, making it the first typeface to become part of the museum's collection. MoMA is also opening a "50 Years of Helvetica" exhibition on Friday. And Helvetica is the subject of a feature documentary, which premiered last month at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.
Why make such a fuss about a typeface? In short, because it does its job so well.
"Helvetica delivers a message quickly and efficiently without imposing itself," said Christian Larsen, curator of the MoMA exhibition. "When reading it, one hardly notices the letter forms, only the meaning, it's that well-designed. It's crisp, clean and sharply legible, yet humanized by round, soft strokes. Many type designers have said that they can not improve on it."
Like all beautifully designed typefaces, Helvetica is a democratic luxury. Great typefaces - like the computer fonts Verdana and Georgia, and the gorgeous 18th-century print lettering of Baskerville and Bodoni - are of the same aesthetic and technical quality as more conventional luxuries, such as Aston Martin sports cars, Andreas Gursky's photographs and haute couture Chanel dresses. The difference is that rather than costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, they're free. You can read a typeface for nothing if a publisher has paid a nominal fee to use it in a book or magazine. And you can choose to read - and send - your e-mails in Helvetica, Verdana or Georgia, because those fonts come free with most computer software packages.
Despite its formal brilliance, Helvetica was not especially successful when it was first introduced in 1957 under its original name, Neue Haas Grotesk. It was conceived by Edouard Hoffmann, director of the Haas Type Foundry in the quiet Swiss town of Münchenstein, as a contemporary version of Akzidenz Grotesk, a late 19th-century sans serif typeface (that's one without decorative squiggles at the ends of the letters) that had become popular with Swiss graphic designers during the mid-1950s. Hoffmann commissioned a little-known typography designer, Max Miedinger, to create the new font. The result was Neue Haas Grotesk, but for several years few people knew about it.
In those days, typefaces were made by carving the shapes of the letters from metal. Anyone wishing to use a particular font had to buy an entire set of letters. This made it so expensive to develop - and to use - new typefaces, that new designs were relatively rare, and many of the most popular fonts were centuries-old, like Baskerville and Bodoni.
Enter the computer. Thanks to technology, typefaces can be designed and distributed so speedily that thousands of new ones are created every year. Their merits and demerits are then debated heatedly on blogs and Web sites. Even we "civilians" - as graphic design geeks call the rest of us - have become amateur typography experts by choosing our favorite styles from the Fonts menus on our computers.
But things were very different in 1961, when the British typography designer Matthew Carter was asked to design a modernized version of Akzidenz Grotesk for the signage in a new terminal at Heathrow Airport. Neue Haas Grotesk had been launched four years before, but he had never heard of it. "If we'd known about it, I'm sure we would have used it, since it's a much better typeface than the one I drew," said Carter, who went on to create Verdana and Georgia. "But the typesetting trade was very conservative then, and new type designs traveled slowly."
During the same year, Haas's parent company, Mergenthaler Linotype, decided to market Neue Haas Grotesk internationally and to change its name to one that would be more memorable in English. As the spruce modernist Swiss Style of graphic design was then very fashionable, they chose Helvetica, as a more accessible and easily pronounceable version of Helvetia, the Latin word for Switzerland.
The rebranding worked. Helvetica proved so popular, especially among U.S. advertising agencies, that it became the default typeface for any 1960s company wishing to project a dynamic, modern image. By the end of the decade, the designers Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda had chosen it as the typeface for New York's new subway signs. However, when the cost-conscious Mass Transit Authority discovered that a similar font, Standard Medium, would be cheaper, the early subway signs were printed in that, not Helvetica.
By the late 1980s, Helvetica was ubiquitous. A digital version of the font, Arial, was introduced in 1990. Arial has since proved popular, but design buffs dismiss it as a cheap pastiche. Half a century on, Helvetica looks as compelling as ever, whether it is on Lufthansa's fuselages or American Apparel's advertising.
"Why do some people find it so strange that a typeface should be used for over 50 years?" said Danny van den Dungen of Experimental Jetset, the Dutch graphic design team. "When something is constructed as well as Helvetica, it should last for a couple of hundred years, just like great architecture.
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