'Godfather' of Helvetica font, Mike Parker, dies at 84
cnn.com
cnn.com
For a poignant account of his later years, and his struggle with Alzheimers, see the blog written by his ex-wife and steady friend, Sybil Masquelier. The entry "The Farewell Tour" describes their final trip to New York in 2011 to receive the Type Designers Club lifetime achievement award.
If I were to try and translate this for the HN crowd I would compare Helvetica to whatever you consider to be the greatest framework of all time. We stand on the shoulders of giants and Mike Parker is one of them.
A couple of anecdotes:
- TeX came to be because Donald Knuth was horribly annoyed with the low quality of then nascent digital typography in the first edition of The Art of Computer Programming. AMS Euler[3] typeface is a product of his collaboration with Hermann Zapf.
- The first practical application of Unix was to run the typesetting in troff for technical documentation at Bell Labs.
[1] http://paulgraham.com/goodart.html
Challenge accepted! It's not important.
;-)
The thing about Helvetica -- its essential character -- is in its directness and balance and understatedness and purity, modulo a few well-known quirks (e.g. capital R).
When you perturb that (rounded terminals for Skype, fucked up "e" and "a" for Evian, block-skew-italic and glyph mods for Microsoft) I feel like you lose the whole point of the typeface.
"Based on Helvetica" is not Helvetica.
Other logos that clearly aren't Helvetica are the the Crate & Barrel logo pictured in the article, which is Arial, and the American Airlines typeface which appears to be a customized Frutiger (although the old version of the logo was set in Helvetica).
It's a perfectly great typeface, but far too overused.
[1] http://myrevuze.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/crate_and_bar... [2] http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/140227182036-02-helv...
- American Airlines famously used Helvetica for decades, but the 2013 rebrand (shown in the picture) uses a newer humanist sans family.
- Evian's logotype shares some of Helvetica's proportions, but it's clearly a different type family (the terminals on the 'e' and 'a' are totally different), possibly a highly customized Frutiger.
- Staples does use Helvetica, but that sign doesn't! I'm not sure if that's from some aborted redesign, cut-rate sign contractor, or what, but compare the size of the counters (open spaces) on both the A and the P: http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/01/02/business/ADCO/ADCO...
- It looks like Skype is using Helvetica Rounded, which is fair (it was added over 20 years after the original Helvetica family), but it's worth pointing that out instead of having an unrelated caption.
Was the Helvetica supposed to be more readable than the Arial? Or is Arial supposed to be a substitute for Helvetica?
NFC how the uppercase editions differ, though. :b
I think it happened more or less by mistake. The intent wasn't to make it be a substitute for Helvetica:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial
The letter shapes of Arial are based on Monotype Grotesque.[5][6] Subtle changes and variations were made to both the letterforms and the spacing between characters in order to make it more readable at various resolutions.
The changes cause the typeface to nearly match Linotype Helvetica in both proportion and weight[7] (see figure), and perfectly match in width. Nevertheless, there are differences. One columnist observed "Arial was drawn more rounded than [Helvetica], the curves softer and fuller and the counters more open. The ends of the strokes on letters such as c, e, g and s, rather than being cut off on the horizontal, are terminated at the more natural angle in relation to the stroke direction."
The story is this: all the big typesetting companies, like Berthold, Linotype, Monotype and so on, have been type foundries originally. They created printing characters of lead. Later they started to develop mechanical machinery for typesetting (especially Linotype) and soon after they started to develop machinery for fototypesetting (making way for the wide spread use of offset-printing, replacing letterpress printing). All the time, they also provided the fonts for their machinery and this fonts were very expensive. A single typeface (like Helvetica 55) would cost around 800 German Marks (roughly 550 US$ today) as a mercury-metallized glas plate from Berthold, containing the full character set. A type shop would often spend more money for the fonts than for the machinery (and the typeshop I was working for even had a dedicated insurance for the glas plates).
All the modern copyright laws existed already at this time and the big problem was, that a certain fontstyle would become fashionable (like Helvetica!) in the designers world, but only one type foundry owned the font. Fonts were not interchangeable between vendors and owning a good font collection with a lot of fashionable fonts could influence the system decision for the typesetting machinery. So all big manufacturers spent a lot of money for their own type labs AND for lawyers! I grew up in the font atelier of the H.Berthold AG in Taufkirchen, near Munich, where my father was working and I witnessed as a teenager, how they digitized the lead fonts into fototype fonts - an incredible laborous and artistic job.
Often, there was a big pressure to provide a certain font style within the vendors system environment, and so it was common to clone the popular fonts if they were owned by someone else. There have been lots of lawsuits, where judges had to decide whether two fonts are distinguishable enough, or have to be considered illegal copies. All the many variants we have of the Helvetica, like the Akzidenz Grotesk, the Normal Grotesk, the Neue Haas Grotesk, the Arial etc, have their motives not so much in readability or artistic reasons, but rather in license conflicts of different type foundries. Sometimes the cloning font lab was better than the original and the clone came out better than the original. VERY MANY fonts of the professional typesetting world were cloned again when Desktop Publishing emerged, to avoid license fees in the PostScript world. These copies can be recognized by their silly names. This development, in general, worsened the font quality. Not so much for the look-a-like of the single character, but for the metadata like "aesthetics letter widths".
So, just look into the owners of the fonts that seem undistinguishable for you, and the whole thing starts making sense: Akzidenz Grotesk = H. Berthold AG; Helvetica = Linotype; Arial = Monotype; Maxima = Helvetica of the former East German Republic (they did not want to use the font of the enemy).
Nevertheless, Helvetica is the best ;-)
(And just to make this clear: Univers, Futura and Frutiger do not have the slightest similarity with Helvetica)
Many years ago I read a fascinating article (I believe from Eric Spiekerman), about the efforts to re-design the forms of the Deutsche Bundespost (German state mail service). In an analysis they found more than 600 variations of Helvetica in use within the organization before the relaunch.
The 1983 effort to design the "Neue Helvetica" (by Stempel, for Linotype) was certainly motivated by this defragmentation of Helvetica-variations, and it was sort of a last conservation before DTP would do all its damages to font identity and quality.
I am not sure what Mike Parkers role was in this process, but I would assume that he came into play after 1960 and that his role was more in the realization of Helvetica's impact and value for the graphical industry, rather than the original design. Which, in my eyes, sort of disqualifies him for the godfather-title. Nevertheless, I cry for all the big names in the typo-world, as one after another dies these days.
I have seen the Helvetica documentary, and I cried tears while watching, because I grew up with Helvetica as a reader and as a professional typesetter (typesetting was a 3-year apprenticeship in Germany around 1980). There is a big cultural thing about Helvetica, that cannot be expressed in words and that is not accessible to digital natives. There is only one true Helvetica face, and it has to be used and typesetted correctly, and in this combination it clearly stands out from everything else. For me, it is the one true font. You cannot fake it. You cannot (and should not) use it for every purpose. And the font has been misused, distorted, copied, derranged, overused and betrayed in every possible way - to the degree that noone can stand it anymore.
But try to find some airplane security card from German Lufthansa from the year 1982 and you will understand, how Helvetica can be used to build trust and confidence in airflight passengers!
The Helvetica documentary was quite good in giving a vague feeling, what cultural impact can be coded in the history of one single typeface! These days are gone, though, and I feel woe and grief with the decline of cultural typographical awareness and the loss of people like Mike Parker.
In Chapter 9 "What is it about the Swiss?" Garfield writes about Helvetica "On an emotional plane, it serves several functions. It has geographical baggage, its Swiss heritage laying a backdrop of impartiality, neutrality and freshness (it helps at this point if you think of Switzerland as a place of Alps/cow bells/spring flowers rather than Zurich and its erstwhile heroin problem)." There is a longer extract from the book here: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665881/how-helvetica-conquered-...
A broader article on Swiss graphic design: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/17/lessons-from-swis...
Yes, sometimes, but I prefer it when the original signs tell me what sign I'm at on the New York City Subway:
IRT: http://instagram.com/p/fBVpruQAcE/
I personally prefer a more evenly kerned quasi-typewriter font like Inconsolata, but it takes a lot of work to get it looking right on all browsers.
I'd say it's closer to vanilla: So versatile and distinct that it was elevated to ubiquity. Your average person would have a hard time telling you when helvetica was created or when vanilla ice cream was created. That's an achievement.
As an experiment, I just tried shifting the editor's font to Comic Sans and writing some code. Did really feel any different to me. Obviously it didn't change any unit tests, but I didn't feel any subjective differences, either.
Oddly enough, since I didn't write down what the default font was, I'll probably be coding in Comic Sans for the foreseeable future. If this becomes an issue, I guess that I'll switch fonts, but, at the moment, I still don't understand what the big deal is.
For the record, I'm not trying to be snarky. I was really hoping that switching my editor to comic sans would enlighten me on the difference between using a "good" font and a "bad" font, but I still don't see it.
Also surely you get the sense of informalness that comes from Comic Sans? Do you at least understand why it looks silly on something like a "DANGER, HIGH VOLTAGE" sign
Nope, he never said that. I did. And I use monospace fonts.
I understand the formality that is conveyed; I just don't care for that layer of information myself. I'd find it silly if I saw monospace typography at Disneyland or a children's book -- but from a readability standpoint I think i'd likely be impressed.
So, many engineers I've come in contact with care deeply about their fonts, but view much of what happens in typography as a distraction.