There are moments in your life when you suddenly understand the concept of joy. If you look at the “F” and you see this pinch, or the lower case “t” - all of that was born out of “Can I make this clearer at 3pt on a Retina Display or on a super high-res print?” I think these letters appear even more like Helvetica at those ultra-small sizes. The visual adjustments are very noticeable when you blow them up. Only at the last minute, after I got that right, did I go back and change the actual letterform. It was a lot of fun, and a lot of looking at early Helvetica printing, like 1957-1960 6pt Helvetica in metal, you know, on paper from Switzerland and from Germany, and studying the space between the characters. “can I make this clearer at 3pt on a Retina Display or on a super high-res print?” And then I see this Helvetica Now and I suddenly realize that’s it not what I thought it was. “Does there need to be a new Helvetica?” But then when you see it and you use it, because of the optical sizing, it’s like being reintroduced to an old friend. It’s super important to me because it’s just, it’s one of those things when you say a new Helvetica, I mean, I would shrug. The second most important thing to us and to designers is the optical sizing. If I had to put them in order of what we wanted to change, the first thing - from the customer’s point of view, the user’s point of view, the designer’s point of view - are those alternate characters because they’re the most visible change. It’s very rugged, it works fine, but Helvetica Now was born out of this idea that we could make a new and better Helvetica by returning some of the things that had existed before, and also incorporating some of the lessons we had learned about how people have used Helvetica. I want to be clear, Helvetica is a great typeface, it’s just that it exists in a single master. it’s like being reintroduced to an old friend” ‘Does there need to be a new Helvetica?’ But then when you see it and you use it. They allow users to modulate a feeling of Helvetica, in a way that was lost after the first 30 years. We reintroduced the straight-legged capital “R,” single-story lowercase “a,” lowercase “u” without a trailing serif, a lowercase “t” without a tailing stroke on the bottom right, a beardless “g,” some rounded punctuation. So we wanted to build some of that flavor back into the typeface, that kind of variability. When we went digital, a lot of that nuance of optical sizing sort of washed away.Īlso throughout the first 30 years a lot of variant forms - straight-legged “R,” single-story “a,” rounded punctuation, these sort of alternate characters - were built into the typeface and abandoned by the time it moved into the digital realm. And if you had 72pt type, it was cut to be 72pt type. So if you had 6pt type, it was cut to be 6pt type. All of the sizes of Helvetica early on were physically cut for specific optical sizes.
We looked at the waypoints in the Helvetica design process, going back to 1957 when it was first born. They had identified a short laundry list of things that would be better. Why don’t we start with the “In the beginning” kind of story.įour years ago, our German office kicking around the idea of creating a new version of Helvetica. So what is Helvetica Now? Can you tell us a little bit about how it differs from Helvetica and Helvetica Neue? Toggling through Helvetica Now text, display, and micro
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. To learn more about what’s different and new in Helvetica Now, I spoke with Charles Nix, the type director at Monotype. It’s a tremendous overhaul that saw Monotype redraw every single one of Helvetica’s nearly 40,000 characters to be easier and more enjoyable to read, with a particular emphasis on going small: the kind of text you see a lot more of these days on your smartphone or pill bottle.
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It’s that wide array of uses that partly inspired Monotype, the oldest type company in the world and the one that currently holds the rights to Helvetica, to update the storied font for the 21st century. It’s the official typeface of New York City’s subway system, and if you’re reading this on The Verge, you’re mostly reading stories constructed of Helvetica right now. Even if you’re not familiar with the font, you’ve definitely seen it - it’s used for everything from brand logos to books and magazines to the print on labels. Helvetica is one of the most well-known and oft-used typefaces, and it just got a big refresh.
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