“HELVETICA IS LIKE water,” says a recent video about the most popular typeface in the world. The 62-year-old font family, with its sans-serif shapes and clean corners, is ubiquitous. It is used on the signage in New York’s subway system. It is the brand identity of American Airlines, as well as American Apparel. It is on those unfortunate T-shirts that say things like "John & Paul & Ringo & George."
“When something is constructed as well as Helvetica, it should last for a couple of hundred years, just like great architecture,” designer Danny van den Dungen told The New York Times in 2007, when the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective in honor of the typeface.
But Charles Nix is not a fan. Nix is the director of Monotype, the world's largest type company, which currently owns the licensing rights to Helvetica. He doesn’t like that the letters scrunch together at small sizes, that the kerning isn’t even across the board. Designers have gotten used to all sorts of magic tricks to make Helvetica look more legible, like changing the size of punctuation marks to balance the letters. “We jokingly refer to it as Helvetica Stockholm Syndrome,”
Helvetica Now also restores some of the original characteristics of the font that have been lost along the way—a single-story lowercase "a," a capital "R" with straight legs. Those details gave Helvetica its original charm, and Nix says Monotype's designers paid extra attention to bringing these back into Helvetica Now. “It is kind of like visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art with an easel and canvas and painting a Rembrandt,” he says. “You’re following clearly what the master has done before you, and the big difference in our case is that we’re looking to make the type, the artwork, more suitable to the age in which we live.”
As for the Helvetica you already know, it will remain on T-shirts and websites for now. Companies and their designers will have to buy the rights to license Helvetica Now, which means it won’t replace everything you see right away. But Nix thinks that, like a software upgrade on a phone, eventually everyone will upgrade.
ความคิดเห็น