Fun Font Facts About the Amazing Helvetica

Mike Parker may have passed away a few months ago but he’s left behind a legendary trail that no designer worth his/her salt can deny – the amazing Helvetica font.

The majority of design professionals consider Helvetica a casual font that can’t be taken seriously. And why not, considering it’s often mistaken for Arial, Comic Sans and Garamond etc.; used to design funny T-shirt captions, non-serious posters and other common products. But it is this very fact about this Neue Haas Grotesk sans-serif typeface that’s made it all powerful in the font world.

You only have to look around you to realize how.

– It’s used in tax forms
– It’s used in the New York subway stop marks.
– It’s used in brand identities of major brands like Nestle, American Apparel, Apple, Toyota, Target etc. that produce common everyday products.

What’s so compelling about this font is that its design which has been meant for industrial machinery ended up on consumer goods. For its designer, Parker, Helvetica is a font which carries its own self perfectly in any scenario as evidenced from this quote:

“When you talk about the design of fun or Helvetic, what it’s all about is the interrelationship of the negative shape, the figure-ground relationship, the shapes between characters and within characters, with the black, if you like, with the inked surface… I mean you can’t imagine anything moving; it is so firm. It is not a letter that bent to shape; it’s a letter that lives in a powerful matrix of surrounding space. It’s… oh, it’s brilliant when it’s done well.”

So even if you don’t agree, we will honor Helvetica and its creator with this post. We’ve gathered some interesting facts about this font and compiled it in the following infographic.

Do you know any more fun facts about Helvetica or any other font? Share away!

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