Typography in Helvetica

Being an inexperienced designer, I often don't care much about usage of typeface, as long as I like it. A typographer told me what kind of fonts and the size of the fonts I have used, simply by looking at my work.

To be honest, I'm kind of impressed. There are people out there who are so passionate about typefaces that they can breathe, eat and sleep with them. That is the vast diffence between a professional typographer like him and an amateurish like me. Of course, with constently looking at the details and study of typefaces, I'm sure in the years to come, I can be as good as him.

Recently, I watched a video about "Helvetica". It has bring me into another perspective. It is an interesting video talks everything about Helvetica, bringing the awareness to the designers about how Helvetica was created, its history. The famous typographers who take great passion in creating font types and usage of Helvetica.

One of the typographers said that most of the designers do not care about typography at all(which is absolutely true). But he doesn't care. A trend in design industry is that there is always a small group of people who pursue great design and large number of people are doing trash stuffs. If you care about your own works, you will care about the usage of typography.

I also realise that every typeface, like every one of us, has its distinguishing features. You might be forgiven for thinking that some fonts are clones, or identical twins. However, closer inspection reveals subtle differences and nuances that simply escape casual perusal. Something that can really help to heighten our sensitivity to those differences is getting out our magnifying glasses and really taking a closer look.

The two popular typefaces, namely Arial and Helvetica — faces that are often confused, and often the subjects of mistaken identity. But first let me re-introduce you to these two popular faces:



Helvetica
Designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann, Helvetica’s design is based on that of Akzidenz Grotesk (1896), and classified as a Grotesque or Transitional san serif face. Originally it was called Neue Haas Grotesque; in 1960 it was revised and renamed Helvetica (Latin for "Swiss").

Arial
Designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders for Monotype (not Microsoft), it’s classified as Neo Grotesque, was originally called Sonoran San Serif, and was designed for IBM’s bitmap font laser printers. It was first supplied with Windows 3.1 (1992) and was one of the core fonts in all subsequent versions of Windows until Vista, when to all intents and purposes, it was replaced with Calibri.

Sad to say, Arial was born of a hasty decision to avoid paying out massive licensing fees for a typeface that had grown to become the benchmark for most written communication.

I must say Helvetica is still always the prefered choice for mac designers, while Arial is for the pc designers. Most people do not know Helvetica is NOT FREE font. I should try to appreciate those fonts which famous typographers have created.