A Letter Of Termination And On The Birth Announcement Of A...

Helvetica is all around us and it’s like oxygen, you have no choice but to take it in. . The appeal for a clean, professional, and timeless typeface is undeniable. From Fortune 500 logos, to local street signs, Helvetica holds the spot for most widely used font choice to designers and amateur designers alike. What made Helvetica so popular and, why, over 50 years later, does it still retain its popularity? Why does Helvetica work equally effective for both a letter of termination and on the birth announcement of a child? Typography which is the arrangement and interaction of letters on a page is influenced by culture, history, and technology. By exploring these three aspects in relation to Helvetica one will be able to get a better†¦show more content†¦The foundations of the International Typographic Style can be traced to two art schools, the Zurich School of the Applied Arts and the School of Design in Basel, who taught a curriculum in which form follows function. The 1950s saw a boom of the International style when it was epitomized with the creation of several new san-serif type families. The geometric fonts on the 1920s and 30s was rejected in favor of designs inspired by Akzidenz Grotesk fonts. Two fonts would soon take the world by storm. In 1954 a Swiss designer working in Paris by the name of Adrian Frutiger created a family of 21 san-serif fonts which he named, Univers. At the same time, back in Switzerland Edouard Hoffman of the Haas type foundry in Switzerland felt that the Akzidenz Grtotesk fonts should be refined and upgraded. Hoffman had been waiting for the right moment to release a new typeface and in 1956 he contacted Max Miedinger, who had worked with him at Haas and had since branched out as a freelance consultant and designer to help create the new typeface for Haas. Hamburgers. No, not the food, the word. Miedinger began to create a new typeface by working out the letters in the word, hamburgers, a word that includes all st ylistic variations of letters. First working on pencil and paper and then creating photographic reproductions Miedinger set out to create