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Killing off Helvetica

JA July 23

When it comes to typefaces, Helvetica is often thought to be the darling of the sans serifs – stylish, elegant and the very point of corporate neutrality. But one designer, with a hatred to rival that of the ban Comic Sans movement, has other ideas. Bruno Maag (of Dalton Maag fame) has created a typeface which he hopes will eradicate Helvetica if not from the face of the earth, than at least from a few New York subway signs.

Creative Review have republished a great interview with him and editor Patrick Burgoyne on their blog, which was originally released via Naturalis x 7.

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Patrick Burgoyne: Bruno, where does your deep-seated hatred of Helvetica come from? Isn’t hating Helvetica pointless? It’s like air or vanilla ice cream, it’s just there…

Bruno Maag: That’s the point, it is vanilla ice cream. In my whole career in typography, starting with my apprenticeship, I have never used Helvetica. Being a Swiss typographer, it’s always been Univers. Even in my apprenticeship we didn’t have Helvetica in the printshop. Then I went to Basel school of design and of course in Weingart’s workshop it was Univers, never Helvetica. Then I come to England and there’s all these designers using Helvetica! The Macintosh had just come out and Helvetica was on every single machine. Everyone was so fascinated with it … I never understood that.

… And there are a lot of things wrong in the design of Helvetica once you start going in to the detail. I can appreciate why a lot of designers like Helvetica compared to Univers – Univers has a starkness about it, it’s cold. Maybe because of the antique-ness of Helvetica it has a certain charm that Univers lacks and at the same time has this neutrality, so I can see why people go for it, but if you start analysing it and going into the nitty gritty it is quite a horrendous font. It’s quite poorly crafted and has become completely overused. People go on about Arial and how awful it is, and Comic Sans, what an atrocity that is, why not the same about Helvetica? It’s often used wrongly too.

…

PB: So let’s talk about Aktiv, Dalton Maag’s new Helvetica killer. Can you design a typeface in opposition to something? Is that what you set out to do or were you just trying to create as good a grotesk as you could for general use?

BM: It was two-pronged really. One was the fact that we were looking at our font library and felt that we were missing a pure grotesk in a Univers style, purely as a commercial entity. It has been at the back of our minds to do this for the last three or four years now. We wanted to have a grotesk font positioned somewhere between Helvetica and Univers – not as icy cold as Univers but devoid of all the quirks of Helvetica. To have a font that is beautifully crafted, spaced well, with not a chink in a curve or anything – perfectly drawn but hopefully with a bit of personality. We wanted to create something that could be used in a corporate environment but that has that bit of warmth that Univers doesn’t have.

Clearly, because we are competing aganst Univers, Akzidenz and Helvetica there are a lot of close similarities. The x height is fractionally higher than Helvetica but the rounds have a little bit of squareness about them that Helvetica’s don’t have. The differences are really subtle but give it just that bit of personality.

Have a read of the full interview, here.


 

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