Helvetica
Fifty one years ago, Max Miedinger found the perfect sans-serif typeface, Helvetica. That claim is debatable, and there are certainly some very nice sans-serif faces that have come since then, but Helvetica has gotten a tremendous amount of mileage. Somehow over all those years it has managed to still look cool, hip, slick, and corporate while also being used on perfunctory signs like the NO SOLICITORS sign on the glass door of my apartment. That's a little uncanny.
I hadn't paid much attention to Helvetica until I watched the film about the font that came out recently.
One thing it got me thinking about is infinite-dimensional design optimization (like things do). The shapes of a font can be tweaked, so for any font there are other fonts in some neighborhood of it. Helvetica has horizontal terminals, so the ends of the C, S, s, 2, 3, and the tail of the e, g, etc., are all horizontal. The R has a gentle foot to it, and the t has a flat top and the G has an arrow shape to it. Similar fonts in the neighborhood of Helvetica don't have these features and that arguably makes them hold together less well and come off as less crisp. If you tried to improve such fonts, I suspect you'd get back to Helvetica, like some typographic local-energy minimum. If this weren't the case, then why would Helvetica have stuck so well for 50 years despite its apparent overuse? One person in the film suggested that the horizontal terminals gives the curvy letters a sense that they aren't going anywhere, that the C or the 3 won't spring open and that the R and G won't fall over or roll away. This seems very apt. In the table below, which version says the plane will get there safely, the cars will work, all while also saying the tape will stick, the notes will unstick, the taxes will be OK, and the chocolate-chip cookies will make you feel better? It's a lot for such a simple font, but subtleties go a long way.
For example, Arial (which has an interesting dubious history as a Helvetica knockoff) never quite looks right to me. From a design-optimization standpoint, it seems that Helvetica, with it's characteristic horizontal terminals just looks more solid. Compare various weights of Arial to various weights of Helvetica; one column is Helvetica, the other just looks wrong in some subtle knock-off sort of way.
The big C in Crate&Barrel is drawn slightly differently in their logo, so it's nearly a perfect circle.[cite]
On a typographical note, If you want to know what fonts people are using, try What The Font?. Send it a picture (or a URL for a picture) and it guesses the font. There's even an iPhone app.
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benfrantzdale) wrote,
