August 6, 2007Happy Birthday, Helvetica!2007 marks the 50th anniversary of the Helvetica typeface. New York's Museum of Modern Art is running a special exhibition on the history of Helvetica, and it's the subject of an award-winning independent film. According to U.S. News & World Report's commemorative article, Helvetica is so ubiquitous that it's the font for lighted exit signs, cigarette warnings and the U.S. government's tax forms. Corporate brand name logos like American Airlines, Microsoft, Panasonic and 3M all use Helvetica. Wikipedia notes that Helvetica is the official typeface for Canada's federal government. Helvetica was developed in 1957 by Swiss graphic designer Max Miedinger. It was originally called Neue Haas Grotesk. But that didn't catch on, so four years later it was renamed as Helvetica. Did you know that the name Helvetica is derived from Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland? It has been called the typeface of the 20th century, but our typesetters here at IVP tell me that we don't use Helvetica in our books very much anymore. We used to, but other fonts have supplanted Helvetica as the font of choice. Now we use fonts like Berkeley, Garamond, Trajan and Palatino. My own book The Suburban Christian was set in Berkeley, but it used Helvetica on the chapter subtitles. Helvetica is now rarely used for our cover designs. One forthcoming title, Faith, Film & Philosophy, will sport Helvetica on its front cover, but that's the exception these days. Anyway, a toast to Helvetica. Thanks for five decades of service, and may many more e-mails and Word docs sport your clean sans-serif lines for years to come. Posted by Al Hsu
at August 6, 2007 1:24 PM
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