While modern architecture was slowly stripping away superfluous architecture, Swiss typography followed and snipped off stone-carved and frivolous serifs. It appeared in 1956, created deliberately by Eduard Hoffman and Max Miedinger to cherish the new Swiss Style, giving it extraordinary importance, almost as it was a postwar utopian mission. The typeface is currently used in many modern operating systems and other electronic displays. Since then it has been modified into a range of languages and variations. Helvetica has become one of the most popular fonts in the world. Let’s check what makes it so powerful, and see whether you should use it in your upcoming design projects: History of HelveticaĪs one could conclude by the name, Helvetica has Swiss origins (at first, it was called Neue Haas Grotesk, even if that probably sounds like a 1980s German factory instead of a font). You may not really see it, but Helvetica is there – it is on all products, websites, packages, or reading papers. The font is so popular that there is a book and a documentary movie about it.īut how does it come? How can this simple and inconspicuous font be everywhere around us? New York’s MOMA also featured Helvetica, and the typeface won multiple awards and recognition because of it. Other sectors where Helvetica is highly popular are fashion (the iconic Helvetica T-shirt writing saying ‘I hate Helvetica’) and tech producers (Intel, Apple, Microsoft, etc.). Nowadays, the Helvetica font family can be described as ubiquitous, which is why it spells so many important brands (Nestle, Lufthansa, American Apparel, etc.). Observed from the technical aspect, Helvetica is originally a sans serif typeface, the ancestor of Berthold’s 1898 Akzidenz-Grotesk typeface.

Helvetica is definitively (as font geeks with a repulsive turn of phrases like to say) one of the most popular fonts of our time.

Windows font helvetica neue cyrillic