On 50th birthday, a tribute to Helvetica

This placid typeface has been our herald for half a century. A new film examines its life and well-groomed lines.

By Vanessa Gezari, Times Staff Writer
Published September 16, 2007

If you go

Helvetica will be showing on Thursday at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota and on Friday at Valencia Community College in Orlando. See www.helveticafilm.com for details.

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On learning of Helvetica's 50th birthday, one is tempted to search for signs of age: the slightest sag in a once-pert C, the slope that can creep into the shoulders of an m, the struggle for balance - almost imperceptible to the untrained eye - in the limbs of a solidly built K.

Has the grand dame of typefaces - that archetype of neutrality, the typographic signature of the modern era - lost its power to soothe and impress? Is its voice less reassuring than it was in the '60s, when designers flocked to it and captains of industry winked across crowded rooms?

Haters beware. Time has been good to Helvetica. Very good.

In the throes of late middle age, the typeface is having a moment. Helvetica is the subject of a highly praised eponymous documentary that's now touring the world. Its clean lines and formidable consonants are the centerpiece of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, its first-ever show devoted to a typeface.

Getting here hasn't been easy. Helvetica has been dismissed as a shill for big business and blamed for the Vietnam War. It has been the typographic voice of The Man and the countercultural howl on the cover of a Sonic Youth record. It has been promoted and subverted, hidden behind and attacked. Built to carry content without attracting notice, it has become a lightning rod.

"You either love it or you hate it," said Christian Larsen, curator of the MoMA show. "You can't feel bland about it."

Born in the Swiss town of Munchenstein the year the Soviets launched Sputnik, Helvetica was a late bloomer. Its given name was Neue Haas Grotesk, and it wasn't popular. By its fourth birthday, it had been renamed Helvetica, and it began drawing admiring glances from international consumers hooked on Swiss design.

Craving a glimpse of the mature Helvetica, one goes looking. It's our most ubiquitous typeface, but these days it hides amid forests of Verdana and Arial, so familiar that it sometimes seems invisible.

But look harder: It is sans serif - free of tips and curls on its letters - but its R has a curved leg and its G has a spike at the bottom, proof of its impeccable European breeding.

It radiates solidity and grace, like a steel passenger jet that shouldn't be able to fly, yet does it's the typeface of American Airlines and Lufthansa. It's the comforting presence of the United Nations and the official voice of an IRS form, the reliable hominess of Crate and Barrel, the no-hassle practicality of Toyota and the sleek dependability of BMW.

But impostors are everywhere. On the corner, the typeface on a sign for "Deli & Subs" suggests a comic book policeman: squat, red-faced, perpetually annoyed. Helvetica never shows its temper.

At Starbucks, the S has a crimped shape inside its lower curve. It's not Helvetica. Massimo Vignelli, the designer who chose Helvetica for the New York subway system, said that part of its potency lies in the beauty of the negative spaces within and around the letters. The space inside Helvetica's S is as gentle as a cradle.

At last it comes into view. Those big, shiny red letters, perfectly rounded and chunky. That's Helvetica. Authoritative, imperturbable, inexorable - yet friendly.

Helvetica says: Relax. I'm here. Everything's going to be fine.

The sign says: Exxon.

Helvetica is how Exxon lulls drivers to the pumps for $40 fill-ups. It's how Sears promises blenders and so much more. It's how Target whispers that no one will guess that purse is a knockoff.

In the film Helvetica, Paula Scher, a graphic designer with the New York firm Pentagram, calls it "the visual language of corporations." As a young designer, she said, Helvetica represented the establishment - everything she wanted to rebel against.

"That was the grownups' typeface, and by association it was guilty," she said in an interview. "It belonged to government, corporations, all those people responsible for the Vietnam War."

She agrees that Helvetica is beautifully designed, but its prevalence annoys her. In the 1960s, Helvetica rode a design fad that prized abstraction, objectivity and pure rationality. Scher finds it controlling and overwhelmingly male.

"I find it rather fascistic. It's like, 'You shall be orderly, and you shall follow these rules, and these rules will make us neat and nice and we'll have no problems,' " she said. "But at a certain point you go crazy, because there has to be emotion and spirit in life."

Helvetica fell out of favor in the '80s and '90s, when personal computers spawned a horde of digital typefaces. Since 1985, Apple has included the typeface on its machines. But Microsoft, eager to save money, chose a digital knockoff called Arial as its default font. The two fonts look similar, but most designers disdain Arial.

"It doesn't have the grace of Helvetica," said Larsen, the curator.

Then a few years ago, Helvetica started to bounce back. It showed up, tongue-in-cheek, on the covers of British house albums. American Apparel paired it with sexy billboard images, savoring the tension between corporate and risque. Comme des Garcons put it on perfume bottles, and a hip Dutch design firm put it on T-shirts that say "John & Paul & Ringo & George."

At 50, Helvetica still has work to do: Greyhound bus tickets and Nestle bars to sell, Verizon customers to satisfy, iPhone users to entice. It's quintessentially Swiss, after all, eager to help, unwilling to take sides.

But in the end, its neutrality is both its salvation and its curse. It's either an invitingly empty vessel or a false premise, because there's no such thing as neutrality in real life.

Vanessa Gezari can be reached at (727) 893-8650 or vgezari@sptimes.com.

[Last modified September 14, 2007, 17:42:39]