This eighty-minute documentary from 2007 is a film celebrating the most popular, successful and beloved font of the past fifty years. Available for instant viewing on Netflix, it is heartily recommended for indexers. It will give you an added appreciation of the power of this classic font. (inDocs inDexing gives it three stars.)
Named after the Latin word for Switzerland, Helvetica was released to the world in 1957. It had been just a dozen years since WWII instigated tremendous upheaval. Survivors were still in their rebuilding and recovery phase and more amenable than usual to changes. Helvetica was born in this modern atmosphere to idealistic Swiss graphic artists willing to experiment with new forms. To express their love of neutrality, rationality and order, Helvetica's inventors crafted these qualities into a superior sans-serif font.
A serif font has embellishments at the end of the letters, whereas sans-serif fonts do not. The sans-serif Helvetica was developed to be as smooth, symmetrical and balanced as possible, with special attention placed on the spaces between letters. The resulting font improved readability and clarity and even produced a feeling of "ultimate rightness" in readers that went beyond a question of taste.
Prior to the development of Helvetica the cluttered, distracting look of myriad fonts was the norm in print ads. Once Helvetica was applied to advertisements, and shown to make messages more powerful, companies became eager to utilize "the badge of modern society" to replace their old fonts. Making the change to Helvetica was said to be thrilling—akin to having cold water thrown upon oneself after crawling through the desert.
Helvetica became the preferred font on pre-packaged products, road signage and even on tax forms. Early adopters such as American Airlines and the New York City subway system quickly helped to make Helvetica font seem normal and natural. Once Helvetica became ubiquitous people took it for granted. And they soon forgot it hadn't always been around.
By the 1970's Helvetica was considered penultimate. Many truly felt that a better font would never be invented. Yet there was rebellion against Helvetica in the post-modern era of the 1980's in which deconstruction and challenge of text was de rigeur. Graphic artists felt that one way to participate in the post-modern sensibility was to eschew the now mainstream, predictable and familiar font that carried the messages of capitalism and globalization. The neutrality of Helvetica was thrown over for edgy fonts that deliberately caused emotional response upon viewing them.
The font rebellion was short-lived, though. By the late 1990's the print world was ready to go back to Helvetica's classic look. Old school purists retained the notion that it was threatening to visual communication to use any font except Helvetica. But most graphic artists and advertisers welcomed the diversity of old and decided to utilize Helvetica, as well as other fonts.
