As an archetypical jock with a military dad, Andy Roddick possessed the background, work ethic, and attitude of a champion. In 2003, Roddick won his first US Open trophy. It was widely expected that he would have a record-breaking career and would dominate tennis in the tradition of American greats like John McEnroe, Pete Sampras, and Andre Agassi. Roddick did go on to establish a distinguished career as a hard-battling and popular professional but he never won a major again.

Instead, the subsequent year, an elegant man from Switzerland arrived in New York and claimed the American trophy. His name was Roger Federer. Federer proceeded to conquer America in a way no tennis player has before or since — winning the US Open five times in a row, between 2004–2008. However, Federer was not the first Swiss native to enjoy unprecedented dominance in the United States.

Before Federer, there was Helvetica.

Origins

The impetus for Helvetica’s creation, the apocryphal story goes, came from Edouard Hoffmann. Hoffman was the head of Zurich’s Haas’sche Schriftgießerei (or, simply, the “Haas” type foundry).

In 1947, Hoffman hired a talented designer named Max Miedinger as a customer counsellor and typeface sales representative for the Haas Studio in Münchenstein near Basel. Miedinger was trained as a typesetter and had attended evening classes at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich. Between 1936–46, he worked as a typographer in the studio of the town’s Globus department store. In 1956, he went freelance, and Hoffman commissioned him to work on Haas’s new sans serif typeface. Hoffmann also directed Hermann Eidenbenz’s work on Clarendon.

Hoffman and Miedinger were motivated by the renewed, post-war demand for san serifs in Europe at the time. European sans serif typefaces were a distinguished pedigree. Experts consider them descendants of the great Khan of the San Serifs: Akzidenz Grotesk. However, Hoffman and Miedinger felt th older ideas needed refreshing. Dan Reynolds writes: “While Helvetica was not simply a reworking of Akzidenz-Grotesk, its initial development as Neue Haas-Grotesk in Switzerland reflected, in part, the popularity that Akzidenz-Grotesk had begun to enjoy in Western European graphic design during the immediate postwar years.”

Eduard Hoffmann’s notebook with the first proofs that became the typeface Helvetica. From: https://designbooth.com/blog/this-website-is-set-in-neue-haas-grotesk/

Initially, the design was called Neue Haas Grotesk. In 1960, in order to improve its marketability in the United States, the name was changed. Meidinger’s drawings from this period are what we now know as “Helvetica”.

Unique features

Some design historians consider the popularity of Helvetica a random fluke. In my opinion, however, in matters of the collective public consciousness, like in a major tennis tournament, there are no accidental winners. It cannot be that one designer, on a whimsy, decided to use Helvetica. From a throw-away advert in a barely read publication, Helvetica (simply by a process of accidental reuse) became one of the most prominent public typefaces in the United States. It just doesn’t work that way.

Trailer for the documentary on Helvetica by Gary HustwitLogos that use Helvetica.

It is more possible that Helvetica possesses some particular charm or technical design feature that made designers prefer it to other sans serif typefaces. In Gary Hustwit’s documentary on Helvetica, many designers talk about how simple and natural the typeface is, and how much they love using it.

When I cast my mind’s eye over the most recallable feature of Helvetica I always remember the small ‘r’.

Helvetica’s distinctive ‘r’

Recall is something of a paradox as Helvetica’s design consideration is classic Swiss neutrality. On closer examination, Helvetica reveals itself to possess some quirky ornamentation (lacking this “fit” it would otherwise be illegible). The typeface is not meant to be seen or remembered — it is always the message that it is supposed to be conveyed that is supreme. This is why it is — admiringly — called perfect for “corporate vanilla”.

I actually designed myself a little pamphlet zine in InDesign and printed it using Adobe Acrobat’s pamphlet mode on my home printer to better analyse the typeface. I compared it to Johnston, Gill Sans, Futura and Univers 55.

Almost immediately it becomes clear that Helvetica possesses the most symmetrical capital B of this set. Capital J’s tend to be complicated things, and in Helvetica, it is not allowed to descend and stays on the baseline. The K is broken, and most different from the others. The O is oval, not geometric (like Futura), and the P follows the beautiful symmetry of the B. Which brings us to the complicated question of the Q.

Universe 55 has a really, in my opinion, a mollusc freaky Q — it looks like a snail. Futura’s Q, on the other hand, is James Bondish debonair. Gills Sans’ Q is worth of the Queen of England herself. Johnston and Helvetica follow the same ultra-simple approach, except Johnston is a geometric round circle, and Helvetica is an oval. Which one prefers depends on whether one likes ovals or circles. In terms of similarity, except for this Q business, Helvetica’s closest cousin is certainly Univers 55.

In the small letters, Helvetica’s ‘a’ is almost as stylish as its small ‘r’. Everything is kept simple, and the chance to go nuts on the ‘g’ is sensibly left outside the off-stump by the designers. As mentioned earlier, the r is just perfect. It’s not too long like Johnston’s or Univers 55, nor too showy like Gill Sans. Futura’s ‘r’ compares favourably to Helvetica’s but is perhaps just a tad too curved.

Helvetica’s ‘r’ is just beautifully poised — like a diver poised to perform a swan dive or an acrobat acknowledging a nailed landing. This poise is reflected in its numeral ‘1’, which in my opinion, is the most beautiful in its set of numbers.

The Great Serif Extinction

It is also possible, as a reason for the popularity of Helvetica in the United States, that one of Helvetica’s corners snagged on an outcrop of the American collective subconscious — answering a need that is normally fulfilled by a hit track that everyone wants played again, and again, everywhere.

Why should an idea seeped in Swiss modernism enjoy such natural translation and wide currency in a foreign land? Are not the United States and Europe different places and people?

This is obviously a very difficult question to answer. No absolute view is possible. In many ways, the United States is, especially in its cultural, ethnic and legal heritage, a colonial extension of Europe. In many others — such as gun control, local history, environmental standards, female medical science, and the common popularity of basketball — the USA is a radical departure from Europe. Plus, it’s on a whole different continent.

It is also important to keep in mind the historic process by which the san serif typeface emerged and then, slowly, eclipsed the serif. In my piece, On Serifs, I have traced three periods of prominence for the sans serif typeface: the turn of the 19th century when the Rosetta stone and Egyptology were the rage. The second phase, the first half of the 20th century, with the rise of modernism, industrial manufacture and the philosophy of Bauhaus/Arts and Craft in design and manufacture (Helvetica is late-phase result of this era of design in Europe). The third phase we are currently living through. Due to the rise of smart phones and online retail, logos are being re-designed from the shop window to the screen browser window. Serifs are being eliminated from logos at an unprecedented rate.

Image Credit: Radek Seinkeiwicz https://velvetshark.com/articles/why-do-brands-change-their-logos-and-look-like-everyone-else

Of course, Helvetica’s dominance in the United States has not gone unchallenged. Designer’s like David Carson emerged whose design philosophy “broke the grid” and celebrated messy typography in the same way the Dadaists of yore had pioneered.

Whose side is Helvetica on anyway?

It is tempting to portray the san serif typeface, being the natural choice of capitalism with features of European absolutism, as simply the symbolic representation of racial supremacy, mindless consumerism and working-class exploitation. The Joker’s painted on smile. However, the matter is not that straight-forward. As Karl Marx himself observed, Capitalism has the ability to transmute “all that is solid into air”. Nothing can destroy fuedal obligation faster and more efficiently than capitalism (the question is if anything can survive it).

Like the Arts and Crafts movement, we see a global phenomenon, where designers see themselves as nothing more than village-dwelling mystics and humble fair artisans. However, the end-design is then replicated on a mass industrial scale that would horrify the original creators. In this way, Whole Foods is not a lie. It is the concept of a behemoth masquerading as a village fair stall caricatured to an extreme end.

In trying to delineate ideologies such as “capitalism” and “communism” what ends up being revealed instead is that trying to draw demarcations of purity, in the first place, is a futile exercise. Nothing human is free from cross-pollination or influence. For instance, the United States, while marketing itself as a bastion of individual freedom heavily values military service — where honour, duty and sacrifice is considered more important than one soldier’s life. Similarly, in Communist China, the Muslim Uyghurs reportedly have been forced into labour camps to produce goods for brands such as Abercrombie & Fitch, adidas, Amazon, BMW, Gap, H&M, Inditex, Marks & Spencer, Nike, North Face, Puma, PVH, Samsung, UNIQLO, Apple, Esprit, and Fila. The American mall, now a feature in almost every part of the world, I never tire of marvelling, was the idea of a socialist architect, Victor Gruen. Gruen’s idea was to create a pedestrianised space where Americans could park their cars and walk about. Like Helvetica, it is a European concept, inspired from the covered arcades of Paris.

So, we see that what American commerce has done is cannibalise the socialist ideals of the European village-town, and deployed it on steroids in the opposite direction. Instead of reminding us of our common humanity and improving our lives, these products and machines ensure continuing rent and tithe to a small, high-born social elite.

However, despite the crowds, the soul-destroying muzak, makeup-shop white light, black granite, and cold mirrors, and devoid of any spiritual meaning whatsoever, I absolutely love malls. I also love McDonald's and iMacs. Somewhere in the experience of consumerism, there is communion. It can be felt that these designs were intended to free rather than enslave human beings. That the designs are based on an assumption of human fraternity. These spaces and products continue to contain the potential of the beliefs with which they were imagined. Without that, in the first place, they wouldn’t be products for mass consumption. Any human — irrespective of birth, race, caste, gender or sexuality — could enjoy them.

Thus, European modernism retains something of the original joy, playfulness and rebellion of the creators — even in corporate vanilla. There is a ghost in the Helvetica machine. When it will rattle it chains, no one can say.