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Typeface	Helvetica
Category	Sans-serif
Designer(s)	Max Miedinger
Foundry	Haas’sche Schriftgießerei
Date released	1957
Re-issuing foundries	Mergenthaler Linotype Company
Design based on	Akzidenz Grotesk
Variations	Helvetica Neue Nimbus Sans
Also known as	Swiss 721 BT
Sample

Helvetica is the name of a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss graphic designer Max Miedinger.

Contents 1 History 2 Usage 3 Variants 3.1 Alternative character sets 3.2 Styling variants 4 Other similar typefaces 5 References 6 External links

Helvetica was created by Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas type foundry) of Münchenstein, Switzerland. Haas set out to design a new sans-serif typeface that could compete with Akzidenz Grotesk in the Swiss market. Originally called Neue Haas Grotesk, the typeface's name was changed by Haas' German parent company Stempel in 1960 to Helvetica — derived from Confederatio Helvetica, the Latin name for Switzerland — in order to make it more marketable internationally.

Director Gary Hustwit has produced a documentary on Helvetica, called simply Helvetica. It was released in 2007 to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the typeface's introduction. In the film, graphic designer Wim Crouwel says, "The Helvetica was a real step from the 19th century typeface. … We were impressed by that because it was more neutral, and neutralism was a word that we loved. It should be neutral. It shouldn’t have a meaning in itself. The meaning is in the content of the text and not in the typeface."

Helvetica is among the most widely used sans-serif typefaces. Versions exist for the Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Greek alphabets. Unicode character sets include special characters and accents for Hindi, Urdu, Khmer, and Vietnamese. Variants of character-based writing systems including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have been developed to complement Helvetica.

Major companies and products that have used Helvetica in their wordmarks include 3M, American Airlines, American Apparel, the former American Telephone & Telegraph Company, Energizer batteries, Greyhound Lines, Jeep, Lufthansa, Marks & Spencer, Microsoft, Karlsberger, National Car Rental, Panasonic, and Target Corporation.

Apple, Inc.'s Mac OS X uses Helvetica as its default font for numerous applications, and the interface for the iPhone and newer iPods uses Helvetica almost exclusively. New York City's Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) uses Helvetica for all of its subway signs (though some pre-1968 signs sport the similar Medium Standard, an Akzidenz Grotesk-like sans-serif).

Canada's federal government uses Helvetica as its corporate typeface, and encourages its use in all federal agencies and websites^[1]. Helvetica is also used in the USA television rating system (TV-G, TV-Y, TV-Y7, etc.)

Helvetica Fractions contains only characters representing numbers, fractions, percentages.

Helvetica Central European contains only characters supporting letters found in Central European languages.

Helvetica Cyrillic contains only just enough characters supporting letters found in Basic Latin, and Cyrillic code pages.

Helvetica Greek contains only just enough characters supporting letters found in Basic Latin, and Greek code pages.

Helvetica World is a family of four fonts published by Linotype in 2002. It contains 1866 glyphs per font, supporting characters from Latin Extended, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, superscripts and subscripts, letterlike symbols, arrows, mathematical symbols, box drawing, block elements, alphabetic presentation forms, Arabic presentation forms. Similar to Arial, Arabic glyphs do not have fixed weight within each glyph.

Helvetica Textbook contains monospaced version of the font. Some characters such as 1, 4, 6, 9, I, a, f, q, mu, and ¶ are drawn differently from the proportional space version.

Helvetica Rounded contains rounded stroke terminators.

Neue Helvetica, a reworking of Helvetica with a more structurally unified set of weights and widths, was developed at D. Stempel AG, Linotype's daughter company. The studio manager was Wolfgang Schimpf, his assistant Reinhard Haus. Manager of the project was René Kerfante. Erik Spiekermann was the design consultant and designed the literature for the launch in 1983.^[2] The weight and width program of Helvetica Neue is similar to that of the Univers typeface designed by Adrian Frutiger. Neue Helvetica also comes in Outline, but not Textbook or Rounded fonts.

Monotype's Arial, designed in 1982, while different from Helvetica in some few details, has identical character widths, and is indistinguishable by most non-specialists. The capital letters C, G, and R, as well as the lowercase letters a, e, r, and t, are useful for quickly distinguishing Arial and Helvetica.^[3] Differences include:

• Helvetica's strokes are typically cut either horizontally or vertically. This is especially visible in the t, r, and C. Arial employs slanted stroke cuts.
• Helvetica's G has a well-defined spur; Arial does not.
• The tails of the R glyphs and the a glyphs are different.

Nimbus Sans, another similar font family designed as early as 1946 (for Nimbus Sans Black Condensed, Nimbus Sans Black Condensed (D)), is produced by URW. Nimbus Sans L fonts were released under the GNU General Public License.

Generic versions of Helvetica have been made by various vendors, including Monotype Imaging (CG Triumvirate), ParaType (Pragmatica), Bitstream (Swiss 721).

1. ^ FIP Information Design. Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat.
2. ^ "Who Made Helvetica Neue?", typophile.com
3. ^ How to Spot Arial at Mark Simonson Studio

• Typowiki: Helvetica
• linotype.com: Helvetica™ Typeface Family overview & related Information
• Helvetica: A Documentary Film by Gary Hustwit
• Arial vs Helvetica
• MoMA Exhibition (2007), 50 Years of Helvetica
• Helvetica at 50 — BBC News article
• The Helvetica Hegemony: How an unassuming font took over the world — article in Slate, published May 25, 2007
• Helvetica: The little typeface that leaves a big mark — Herald Tribune article on the 50 years of Helvetica
• Photo of Helvetica wallpaper
• fontshop.com: Alternatives to Helvetica
• Helvetica at the Internet Movie Database, a documentary film about the making, use, and history of the Helvetica font