#Metro history typeface movie
#Metro history typeface professional

The dissimilarities are small, but very important, especially 3, r, t, a, R and G. If your eye has not been trained to see the differences between them, you’d probably think it is the same typeface you’re looking at. In fact, they can be so tiny that one would have to take out his magnifying glass to notice them.Ī good example is Arial, a typeface developed in 1982 which has incredible similarities with Helvetica.

Sometimes, they look so similar that we can’t notice the difference between them, but a closer inspection would still deny the presence of casual perusal and would reveal subtle, but important differences. Typefaces, the same as people, vary from each other due to their features. What is the difference between Arial and Helvetica? Years went by, and Helvetica reaffirmed its leading corporate position, being recognized by leading businesses such as American Apparel which used the font to add playfulness to America’s corporate culture.

#Metro history typeface professional

At the same time, it was a way to escape from overdone, kitschy decorated typography, and to develop unique advertisement strategies.Ĭompanies understood Helvetica’s power to convey a professional statement and to transform their identity, right because of its modern sensibility and the sleek lines that have nothing to do with the past. Many experts agree that the biggest factor that influenced Helvetica’s popularity was Steve Jobs’ decision to use it as the basic fond of the Apple operating system even if the font had already become a design classic years before computers actually appeared.Īs we already mentioned, Helvetica was created after the war, which gives it a symbolical value of change to the better – something many companies believe in. It is considered as the most legible version, due to the enlarged space between numbers and the bigger punctuation marks.

Neue Helvetica (New Helvetica), a modern 1983 version with unified character width and height.

It can be used only in its black and bold version (oblique and condensed included) and has an outline version that was never available online.

Helvetica Rounded, designed in 1978, which comprises of rounded stroke terminators.

Helvetica Textbook, a product of altering characters to for informal design.

Mathew Carter’s Helvetica Compressed, quite similar with Helvetica Inserat, but still not identical.

Stempel’s Helvetica Light designed by Arthur Ritzel and artistic director Erich Schultz-Anker.

The alphabet was not the only distinguishing criterion, and Helvetica soon evolved to: Helvetica varied many times, as a result of which there are multiple types and variants available (Korean, Hindi, Cyrillic, Japanese, Vietnamese, Greek, and many others). The era of modern industry was starting, and communication had to be clean and fast! Helvetica Variations & Types While modern architecture was slowly stripping away superfluous architecture, Swiss typography followed and snipped off stone-carved and frivolous serifs. It appeared in 1956, created deliberately by Eduard Hoffman and Max Miedinger to cherish the new Swiss Style, giving it extraordinary importance, almost as it was a postwar utopian mission. The typeface is currently used in many modern operating systems and other electronic displays. Since then it has been modified into a range of languages and variations. Helvetica has become one of the most popular fonts in the world. Let’s check what makes it so powerful, and see whether you should use it in your upcoming design projects: History of HelveticaĪs one could conclude by the name, Helvetica has Swiss origins (at first, it was called Neue Haas Grotesk, even if that probably sounds like a 1980s German factory instead of a font). You may not really see it, but Helvetica is there – it is on all products, websites, packages, or reading papers.

#Metro history typeface movie

The font is so popular that there is a book and a documentary movie about it.īut how does it come? How can this simple and inconspicuous font be everywhere around us? New York’s MOMA also featured Helvetica, and the typeface won multiple awards and recognition because of it. Other sectors where Helvetica is highly popular are fashion (the iconic Helvetica T-shirt writing saying ‘I hate Helvetica’) and tech producers (Intel, Apple, Microsoft, etc.). Nowadays, the Helvetica font family can be described as ubiquitous, which is why it spells so many important brands (Nestle, Lufthansa, American Apparel, etc.). Observed from the technical aspect, Helvetica is originally a sans serif typeface, the ancestor of Berthold’s 1898 Akzidenz-Grotesk typeface. Helvetica is definitively (as font geeks with a repulsive turn of phrases like to say) one of the most popular fonts of our time.