The other day, I watched Helvetica with my housemate. I’m so glad I watched it, I’ve learnt so much.
The documentary doesn’t just focus on Helvetica, but also typography as a whole.
One of the most important things which I learnt from the documentary, which was very relevant to me, was discussion between Helvetica and Arial. I learnt that When Steve Jobs made the Macintosh; he approached Linotype (The owners of Helvetica) and asked them for a licence to use the font as one of the fonts which was provided with the Macintosh.
Microsoft did not want to pay Linotype for a licence so instead, approached Monotype, and asked them to create a similar font. The product of this is Arial. The information was provided from a very biased point of view, but even without that, it’s clear to see why the two fonts are so commonly compared and sometimes mistaken.
I think that given the audiences for each computer (Apple attracting more of the professional design audience) Helvetica always had an advantage over Arial.
Helvetica and Arial can be easily distinguished by particular characters: capital letters C, R, G, Q and lower case letters a, e, r, and t.
There were a lot of other things which I learnt about fonts and how they have been made, and why they are still popular today. Another thing which interested me was the ‘Gotham project’. The Gotham project is led by two men, who have been taking pictures of numbers and interesting building names over the entirety of NY in order to create a new font. It gave me an idea over the inspiration to which a new typeface is born and made me look a little more into the history of both Helvetica and Arial.
Helvetica was created by Max Meidinger and Eduard Hoffmann in 1957. For a while, Helvetica was recognised as Neue Haas Grotesk, and it was only in 1960, 3 years later that it became known as Helvetica. Some of the earliest uses of Helvetica can be seen on old NY Metro maps, were it was recognised and praised for giving a clean and informative style to its maps. More recent examples of Helvetica can still be found on NY Metro, leaflets, timetables and signs. Helvetica is owned by Linotype. The most popular variants of Helvetica are Helvetica Light, Helvetica Compressed and Neue Helvetica.
Arial was created in 1982 for Monotype Typography and was introduced as an alternative Sans Serif to Helvetica. It was first used when IBM released two printers, whom Monotype, were required to provide fonts for. Despite sub-licensing Helvetica, Monotype substituted Helvetica with Arial.
Arial is supported by Microsoft as their alternative to Helvetica, and is one of the ‘core’ true type fonts for Windows.
Arial has many variants, including Regular, Bold, Italic, Black and Extra Bold Italic.
