Behind Helvetica's 21st century renovation process

Helvetica is one of the best known and most used fonts, and it has just been refreshed. Even if you are not familiar with the font, you certainly have seen it: it is used for everything from brand logos to books and magazines to printing on labels. This is the official font of the subway of New York City, and if you're reading this on The edge, you are mainly reading stories built from Helvetica right now. It is this wide range of uses that has in part inspired Monotype, the oldest typographic company in the world and currently holds the rights to Helvetica, to update font for the 21st century.

The new version is called Helvetica Now. Monotype has redesigned each of Helvetica's 40,000 characters to make it easier and more enjoyable to read, with a focus on reading. small: the kind of text you see much more nowadays on your smartphone or pill bottle.

To find out more about what's new and different at Helvetica Now, I spoke to Charles Nix, Monotype's character director.

This interview has been modified for clarity and brevity.

So what is Helvetica Now? Can you tell us a little more about the differences between Helvetica and Helvetica Neue?

Why do not we start with the kind of story "At the beginning".

Sure!

Four years ago, our German office launched the idea to create a new version of Helvetica. They had identified a short list of things to improve. We examined the waypoints in the design process of Helvetica, which dates back to 1957, the year of its birth. At first, all sizes of Helvetica were physically cut for specific optical sizes. So, if you had the 6pt type, it was cut to be the 6pt type. And if you had the 72pt type, it was cut to be the 72pt type. When we switched to digital, much of this shade of optical sizing disappeared.

In addition, during the first 30 years, many variants – an "R" in the right leg, a "one", a rounded punctuation, this type of alternative characters – were incorporated into the font and were dropped at the time of scanning. field. So we wanted to integrate some of that flavor into the font, that kind of variability. We reintroduced the capital letter "R", tiny "a", "tiny" "u" without a final hiss, a tiny "t" without a tail stroke on the bottom right, a "g" beardless, some rounded. punctuation. They allow users to modulate a feeling of Helvetica, in a way that was lost after the first 30 years.

Let's be clear: Helvetica is an excellent font. It's just that it exists in one master. It's very robust, it works well, but Helvetica Now was born from the idea that we could create a new and better Helvetica by doing some things that previously existed and by also incorporating some of the lessons we had learned about. used Helvetica.

If I had to put them in order of what we wanted to change, the first thing – from the customer's point of view, from the point of view of the user, from the point of view of the designer – are these alternative characters, because they are the most visible change. . The second most important thing for us and for designers is optical sizing. It's very important to me because it's right, it's one of those things when you talk about a new Helvetica, I mean, I would shrug my shoulders. "Is there a need for a new Helvetica?" But when you see it and use it, because of optical sizing, it's like being reintroduced to an old friend. It's amazing. I thought I knew Helvetica. I thought I did not need Helvetica. And then I see this Helvetica now and I realize suddenly that's not what I thought.

How do you even approach the creation of a new version of Helvetica, while it is a standard also known?

The most popular font in the history of the world, how do you plan to redefine it? Well, with extreme concern. [laughter] Better not to spoil it! Of course, I'm not going to ruin this, but realize how much you have to deal with the initial load: dive into the forms, study the story, look at each iteration from 1957 to now, understand how it has evolved and where the mistakes have occurred – which can be corrected and what needs to be preserved.

It's like the oath of Hippocrates: "Do no harm". Simplicity, clarity, neutrality, be it the mantra that you constantly repeat when you create all forms. If you make changes, make sure the variation serves that mantra. My role in the whole process was pickups, kind of crazy fonts at 6, 5, 4 or even the smallest pixel counts, as well as text fonts.

It was very amusing and a lot to look at the first impressions of Helvetica, like Helvetica 1956-1960 metal, you know, on Swiss and German paper, and to study the space between characters. It was only at the last minute, once I was right, that I came back and changed the letter. Visual adjustments are very noticeable when you inflate them. If you look at the "F" and you see this pinch, or the tiny "t", all that is born from "Can I clarify this to 3 points on a Retina display or on a high resolution print? "I think these letters look even more like Helvetica for these extremely small sizes.

There are moments in your life where you suddenly understand the concept of joy. I do not want to be too dramatic about it, but the first evidence that we removed Helvetica Now micro was one of those moments in my life. Like "Oh my god, the theory is true." Every assumption we had about how to make a microphone type more legible, to preserve Helvetica's impression, played out.

And I just remember reading 3 and 4 point type characters and thinking it was a marvel, because Helvetica was still dying at 6 points. He died at 7 or 8 pt because of the closed openings, because of the narrow forms and the narrow spacing. Making it suddenly incredibly legible at 3 points is one of those times when the sky opens and the angels sing. There was really a big smile on my face.

Is there a particular character you are most proud of?

The micro pound sterling for the British currency. I was at a baseball game with a friend of mine, who is also a designer, who said that one of his friends described the art in terms of work done better than necessary. I spent a lot of time making the sterling work really well at 3 points and maintain the quality. When you look at it, it looks like an impressionistic painting of form.

There were moments with a lot of micro-currencies where I cut some vertical bars, like in the symbol of the yen, the symbol of the micro-euro, in order to read it really well in lowercase, lowercase or below. environment on the screen. When I hear that, it sounds like sacrilege, but it's in a spirit of simplicity, clarity and neutrality. It's not like I took liberties: I saw what I needed to be more readable and I went there.

You have taken an oath! You had to do it. [laughter]

Have you ever imagined working on a project to update Helvetica?

No, I have used Helvetica a lot, but it was before 1990, when I was young adult. I had a mentor, George Sadek, from the Cooper Union, who was obsessed with Helvetica. He thought of Helvetica in terms of Helvetica for Linotronic 330, or Helvetica for metal, the same thing that Massimo Vignelli fell in love with when he saw Helvetica. Massimo recounted how he had seen Helvetica and was so impressed that he had bought it to stick to the trunk of his car. George Sadek had a love affair with Helvetica. It was the neutral voice of mid-century modernism.

And after the release of Helvetica Neue and the integration of desktop publishing to digital workflows with PageMaker, QuarkXPress and, possibly, InDesign, Helvetica broke down paper with me. Part of that was "you do not follow the religion of your elders", you know, the natural desire to reject everything you learn to find something new. The other part was that I did not leave Helvetica from what I had seen before. It was not the same thing. The world was gigantic and I wanted to use other fonts.

All this to say that when Tom Rickner contacted me last year to propose to work on Helvetica Now, my first reaction was: "I would never use this font; yes, I want to be involved. I absolutely and deeply wanted to be involved in all this, for all the reasons I rejected it. Because I had the impression that there was something more out there. I was so excited to be invited to be part of a team that would give that animating spirit back.

Do you think we will have to wait another 30 to 50 years to get an updated Helvetica?

If we did our job well, yes. Hans Eduard Meier and Eduard Hoffmann introduced Helvetica in 1957 and, almost immediately afterwards, they began to enlarge the family. Make a weight of text; to make a light weight; make a fat weight – which means extra fat – make a black weight; do the italics. So these things have been put in place relatively quickly, given the amount of work required.

Then the axis of the width begins to be filled: Helvetica Condensed and Helvetica Expanded. I think this is the next step for this project, in my mind. I'm not the whole society, I'm just a typographer, but my two cents are to say that instead of waiting 30 years for a new Helvetica, it would only take a year or two for the axis of width is filled.

I divide the typographic world between the display font and the text font. The display fonts are like the charismatic megafauna of the world. We are obsessed with buffalo, zebra or giraffe. Meanwhile, the majority of animals in the world are smaller than our thumbs. We are obsessed with display typography, but most of the character settings in the world are done at the text level. And then there's an even more massive amount of composition at the micro level, like everything on the pill bottles or the wording in the subsections of your tax code. There are a lot of microtypes out there. I feel as if Helvetica Now Condensed and Expanded in this environment will offer an amazing design tool.

Could you ever imagine Helvetica as a variable font (a unique font file that allows infinite flexibility in terms of weight, width and other attributes without also gaining size)?

Yeah absolutely. I mean, that's what I want. When defining subtitles on the web, imagine if you could compose the ideal weight. Of course, we need a microphone, but can I just have a little lighter? This is the world in which we all want to live. Or, better yet, program behaviors that allow CSS to move forward and do the work for you.

I mean, we are not far off.

Update from April 9 at 5:30 pm ET: Nix corrected his earlier statement to indicate that he was not employed by Monotype at the time when the German bureau was discussing a new version of Helvetica.