Aptly for a Swiss font, it seemed international in that only minor changes were necessary to make it adapt to a different culture. Helvetica fairly took off, quickly becoming the font of choice for street signs. He but put forward Helvetica as an alternative. It seemed inappropriate for a font to carry the name of a country. The marketing director of Stempel, which owned Haas, wanted to call it "Helvetia," which is the Latin name for Switzerland. From this, Switzerland's Haas type foundry created "Neuer Haas Groesk." It was hardly a particularly appealing name for a font that its maker hoped to pitch in America.
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In the search for an international style, the Helvetica font emerged: a rational typeface, underpinned by this idealism.Ĭlean and direct, Helvetica owed much to the German Akzidenz Grotesk, which had been born in the last century out of Europe's modernist movement. Design, so went the theory, could make things more open, and ensure that they ran more smoothly. The era was characterized by a sense of social responsibility, in which designers were inspired by the idea that design could play a key role in postwar reconstruction. The Helvetica font dates back to 1957, a time when it was thought that honest, functional communication could inspire people to make better choices. You may also have noticed that each letter's strokes terminate in horizontal or vertical lines.
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"As with other Swiss designs, it appears that the inner white shapes serve as a firm guide to the black around them, an aspect that one designer called 'a locked-in rightness,'" writes Simon Garfield in Just My Type: A Book About Fonts. You might spot the unusually tight spacing between letters. It's a "sans-serif" type, with none of the extending features at the end of strokes that are common in the print world. You'll recognize that unmistakably international feel and distinctively Swiss neutrality, which seems almost to push and pull the different letters into conformity.