Typography in the Form of Helvetica

"You can say, "I love you," in Helvetica. And you can say it with Helvetica Extra Light if you want to be really fancy. Or you can say it with the Extra Bold if it's really intensive and passionate, you know, and it might work."

-Massimo Vignelli





The reason I chose Helvetica, despite the negative and positive connotations in society, is because it has always been my go-to font. When I am having trouble deciding what to use for a title page, or how to make an e-mail pop out, Helvetica has always been my typeface of choice. I’ve always been a fan of type, but particularly Helvetica because as the quote above describes, you really can use all of Helvetica’s variations to get your point across in numerous ways.


According to Typophile:
Helvetica is a Grotesque sans serif face, also classified as Lineal under the Vox-ATypl Classification of Type. The strokes in Helvetica are monotone in weight and the overall forms of the typeface itself are based on Akzidenz-Grotesk from Berthold (around 1898). In 1957, at the behest of the Haas Typefoundry's Eduard Hoffman, Max Miedinger designed a Grotesque sans serif face, distributed as Neue Haas Grotesk. In 1960, Linotype and D.Stempel AG in Frankfurt decided to take the face over and redrew it for the Linotype machine. (51% of Haas was owned by Stempel, which itself was controlled by Linotype since 1941). Haas still produced type for hand composition and larger sizes. Stempel and Linotype were not fond of selling a typeface that was named after a "competing" company (Haas), so they wanted to rename it "Helvetia," the Latin name for Switzerland. Eduard Hoffmann disliked the idea to name the typeface after a country and suggested "Helvetica": Latin for "Swiss". 

Overall, this font has come a long way in history, and overtime, several variations of the font have been created. This font is seen everywhere - street signs, logos, etc. Although some people may see it as boisterous font due to it's appearance everywhere, I support the font because it has always displayed the perception I've always tried to portray.