The full block-letter alphabet first appeared in 1916. Its creation seems to have been a relatively painless process, with Johnston offering only very few drafts (a confidence born of calligraphic experience). His principal tenet was a search for excellence: ‘The letters of the alphabet have certain essential forms,’ he wrote when he began the project. ‘We have as much right to use the best letters in writing or printing a book as to use the best bricks, if we can get them, in building a house.’
Three of the classic letters from Johnston’s alphabet
One of Johnston Sans’ earliest appearances was in a draft poster (never issued) advocating the Tube as the safest form of wartime transport:
OUR TRAINS ARE RUN BY LIGHTNING
OUR TUBE LIKE THUNDER SOUND
BUT YOU CAN DODGE THE THUNDERBOLT
BY GOING UNDERGROUND.
And then, handwritten beneath it: Travel by the bomb-proof Railway!
The font made its first official appearance in 1916 on a series of workmanlike posters announcing fares from Hammersmith to Twickenham (4d), and promoting the Arts & Crafts Exhibition at the Royal Academy (nearest tube Dover Street, long since closed). Its future use would be more colourful and imaginative, and consistently beautiful:
SEE THE SHOW OF DAHLIAS NEAR
QUEEN ANNE’S GATE
IN THE COOL OF THE EVENING SEEK OUT
A FRESH AND AIRY SPACE FOR PLEASURE BY
LONDON’S UNDERGROUND
Accompanied by fine prints by Graham Sutherland, Edward Bawden, Paul Nash and Sybil Andrews, the text and artwork promoted London’s treasures as never before. It wasn’t just promotional material for a transport system – it was a celebration of heritage and cultural well-being. It was also scintillating propaganda: every open-air space, every child-marauding park, would be an unadulterated relief after the overcrowded sooty dankness of the Tube.
Johnston’s letters were drawn on tracing paper and then cut in wood, but it is unlikely that he ever envisaged their use much beyond posters and information display, and certainly not as an enduring typeface. Looking back on his work in 1935, he expressed regret that he was more honoured abroad than at home. ‘This particular design appears to have become of considerable historic importance (in the world of Alphabets). It seems also to have made a great impression in parts of Central Europe – where I understand it has given me a reputation which my own country is too practical to recognize.’ By the time he died in 1944 this was slowly beginning to change. These days his achievement is widely acknowledged as one of the most successful corporate identities ever created.
Smoothing out the Johnston roundel
As so often with type design, Johnston’s work underwent piecemeal adaptations over the years, not all of them happy. After the war, a thinner form, Johnston Light, was used on illuminated boards. Then in 1973, Berthold Wolpe drew a warmer condensed italic to sit alongside Johnston, and the designer Walter Tracy modified some letters – widening the a, lightening the g and, controversially, shortening the tail of the l. But by the end of the 1970s, London Transport’s publicity and marketing people were frustrated with the straitjacket of a type designed during the Great War, in a pre-digital age. It lacked variety of weight, it didn’t adapt well to new design and printing methods, and increasingly they were tempted by Gill Sans, Univers and a Bembo italic to meet their needs.
Enter Eiichi Kono, a Japanese optics expert who had been studying in London for five years. Working for the British firm Banks & Miles, he was given the daunting task of overhauling Johnston’s font. He arrived for his first day at his new job, in 1979, to be confronted by large sheets of the original wood-printed design. ‘It felt like my first arrival at London Heathrow Airport,’ he recalled, ‘worrying about which way to go.’ Before he imported a concave lens, microscope and camera from Tokyo, Kono used primitive tools to draft the new letters: black paper, a scalpel, a fine Rotring pen, masking tape, 3M Spray Mount and tweezers.
The original Johnston Sans had only two weights, a regular and a bold. In time, Kono would design eight new ones – including a lighter face and a bolder lower case. He made several alterations to familiar shapes, shortening a few terminals and narrowing the counters within h, m, n and u. He acknowledged two dangers: that he would lose the circular flow of Johnston’s original, and that he would end up making a poor clone of Univers. The battle won, Kono found a good way to signal his East Asian input on a London landmark: when he came to present his work for the first time he displayed his various New Johnston fonts with just one word: .
‘Old’ and ‘New’ Johnston
Working alongside Kono, Colin Banks was struck by how exceptional it was that an amateur’s type had endured for so long. Banks regarded the original Johnston font as ‘the most revolutionary and inspirational of twentieth-century letterforms’, and there was a reason for this: Johnston still thought with his quill. He was a brilliant primitive, making all his letters the same width and dismissing the accepted rules about ‘correct’ spacing.
In 1916, the same year that Johnston’s work appeared, Lucien Alphonse Legros and John Cameron Grant published their exhaustive study of the optical adjustments that were required of a typeface to aid readability and achieve visually balanced characters (this was the study that observed that a lower-case t often has to lean backwards, and the dot over the i has to be offset a little to the left). Perhaps this is why Johnston’s letters still look so radical: they stick out, they don’t conform, and they arrest the eye – partly because Johnston never read the manual. Even with the tweaks over the years, their nonconformity endures.
The new types perfected by Kono at Banks & Miles were accompanied by strict guidelines. ‘These rules are mandatory,’ stated the literature that went to London Transport’s in-house designers. ‘There must be no attempts to modify them in any way. The New Johnston typefaces must never be re-drawn, re-proportioned or altered in any way. New Johnston should be used wherever possible. If for practical reasons it can’t be, use Gill Sans.’
Sixty years after Johnston standardized subterranean London, many of the world’s other subway systems remained an uncoordinated scramble; it was a wonder that anyone ever found their connections, or re-emerged into the light.
Guimard’s quintessentially Parisian Métro sign
The Paris Métro was a stunningly confusing place, albeit an enchanting one with all that art nouveau enamel, tiling and metalwork. When it opened for business in 1900, its signage, designed by Hector Guimard, was an elaborate, proud series of curls and swellings that could only be French. As the century advanced, and the network fanned out to the suburbs, each station architect seemed to be given free rein to choose the lettering style they found most pleasing at the time; the local signage would fit the look of Pont de Neuilly or Père Lachaise, but there was no attempt at uniformity.
Things got a little clearer for Parisians in the early 1970s, when Adrian Frutiger was brought in to establish not only some form of unity but also a system versed in legibility. Alphabet Metro was a new form of his Univers, and was all-caps white-on-blue. It was introduced with unusual sensitivity. ‘The Métro is like an old lady,’ Frutiger declared. ‘You can’t simply transform her into a modern creature.’ Accordingly, new signs were mainly introduced only when old ones broke.
The new face of the Paris Mètro – Parisine by Jean François Porchez
A more complete transformation occurred in the mid-1990s, when Jean François Porchez introduced his font family a modern and flexible combination of upper and lower case that remains the standard lettering today.
There was a similar story in New York. As it developed, the subway acquired an alluring mess of enamel signs and mosaic tiles in a bewildering range of type – usually a form of Franklin Gothic or Bookman, sometimes with a touch of art deco, occasionally with old-style roman serifs. The jumble was usually attributed to the fact that the subway was an amalgam of three separate train companies – though London’s own Tube had six separ
ately managed lines before being integrated as London Transport in 1933.
Vignelli Associates 1966 designs for the New York City Transit Authority
It was 1967 before the New York subway authorities agreed a grand scheme for establishing uniform station signage. When they did, the typeface chosen was (also known as Akzidenz Grotesk), a bold, honest German sans serif from the end of the nineteenth century. It should have worked but adherence to the new system was patchy – many old signs were not removed, while frequently the most dominant signage seemed to be the graffiti that had smothered the subway in the early days of hip hop. In 1979 the New York Times reported that ‘in many stations the signs are so confusing that one is tempted to wish they were not there at all – a wish that is, in fact, granted in numerous other stations and on all too many of the subway cars themselves.’
But help was at hand. One particular modern font had been proposed for the subway since the mid-1960s, not long after it became widely available in the US. It would appear on the redesigned subway map in 1972, and then in 1989 it was introduced in a medium weight to unify the entire network. As above, so below: subterranean New York had finally succumbed to Helvetica.
Or, to be precise: what is it about the Swiss and their sans serif typefaces? and Univers both emerged from Switzerland in the same year – 1957 – and went out to shape the modern world. They would sort out not just transport systems but whole cities, and no typefaces ever looked more sure of themselves or their purpose. The two fonts appeared at a time when Europe had thrown off all shackles of post-war austerity and had already made a strong contribution to mid-century modernism. You could sit in your Bertoia Diamond chair (Italy, 1952) and read about a forthcoming concept called IKEA (Sweden, 1958), while all around you buildings began to get squarer and more functional. Helvetica and Univers were perfectly suited to this period, and their use reflected another pervasive force of the age – the coming of mass travel and modern consumerism.
New York’s subway goes Helvetica
Helvetica is a font of such practicality – and, its adherents would suggest, such beauty – that it is both ubiquitous and something of a cult. The typeface even inspired a compelling and successful movie (Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica), whose premise is that on the streets of the world, the font is like oxygen. You have little choice but to breathe it in.
A few years ago, a New Yorker called Cyrus Highsmith put his life on the line by trying to spend a day without Helvetica. As a type designer himself, he knew it would be a challenge. Whenever he saw something spelled out in the typeface he would have to avert his eyes. He wouldn’t take any Helvetica-signed transport, nor buy any Helvetica-branded products. He might have to walk into New York City from its suburbs; possibly go hungry all day.
His troubles began as soon as he climbed out of bed. Most of his clothes had washing instructions in Helvetica, and he struggled to find something that didn’t; he settled, eventually, on an old T-shirt and army fatigues. For breakfast he had Japanese tea and some fruit, foregoing his usual yoghurt (Helvetica label). He couldn’t read the New York Times as that had Helvetica in its tables. The subway was out of the question, though to his relief he found a Helvetica-free bus.
At lunch he thought he’d try Chinatown but had to switch restaurants as the first had a familiar-looking menu. At work he had, in advance, deleted Helvetica from his computer, but he couldn’t – obviously – browse the Internet. He was late back home because he couldn’t consult the timetable, and had to be highly selective about his cash, as Helvetica graces the new US dollar bills. Inevitably, there was Helvetica on his credit cards, too. In the evening he thought he’d watch TV but the controls had Helvetica on them. So he read The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, set in Electra.
After he undertook his non-Helvetica day, Highsmith posed himself a philosophical question. ‘Do you need type to live?’ The answer of course is no, not in the way one needs food and water. But do you need Helvetica to conduct contemporary urban activity? That’s harder to answer.
Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica movie would suggest you do. His film examines how the font took over the world, opening with shots of the font in Manhattan – on the Times Square booth, , , , the subway, mail-boxes. Then come images of , , , , , , , , , , , , , on and on. The film also tracks the font’s genesis, talking to its key surviving creators, none of whom could really comprehend how such a clean little alphabet got so big.
The best section in the movie occurs a third of the way through. The designer Michael Bierut is explaining why Helvetica had such a deep impact on advertising and corporate branding in the 1960s, imagining how remarkable it must have been for an identity consultant to have taken a traditional company like Amalgamated Widget, which was previously represented on its letterheads by a goofy script typeface and a line-drawing of a factory belching smoke, and then sweeping it all away in favour of just one word in Helvetica: . ‘Can you imagine how bracing and thrilling that was?’ Bierut asks. ‘That must have felt like you had crawled through a desert with your mouth caked with filthy dust, and then someone offers you a clear, refreshing distilled icy glass of water … it must have just been fantastic.’
Bierut then demonstrates his thoughts by flicking through two contrasting adverts for Coca-Cola, one before Helvetica, and one after. The first one features a smiling family and curly cursive lettering. The second one only shows a big glass of Coke and ice, with vapour bubbles on the glass. The slogan beneath it reads Or as Bierut puts it, ‘It’s the real thing, period. Coke, period. In Helvetica, period. Any questions? Of course not – Drink Coke! Period.’
Helvetica makeover: ‘Can you imagine how bracing and thrilling that was?’
Helvetica began life in 1957 as Neue Haas Grotesk, a comprehensive modernization of from 1898. It was conceived by Eduard Hoffmann and executed by Max Miedinger for the Haas foundry in Münchenstein, near Basel, and renamed Helvetica (an amended form of Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland) in 1960. It was licensed to other, larger, foundries, Stempel of Frankfurt and then Mergenthaler Linotype, and from the mid-1960s it began to gain a reputation overseas, particularly among the design executives on Madison Avenue. The range of weights was restricted initially to light and medium, but when italic, bold and others were added, the face we recognize today began to colonize the world.
It shows no sign of abating. In the spring of 2010, the big in-store push at the troubled clothing manufacturer American Apparel was for the Unisex Viscose Sexuali Tank, available in dark orchid for $24. This is basically a long vest, with all its sizing and washing details displayed – in Helvetica, of course. American Apparel, which uses more Helvetica per square metre than any other place on earth, had realized a simple truth: it doesn’t need guile or tricksy emotional psychology to sell its wares – not when it has a bold typeface from Europe that came in with our mother’s milk.
Lars Müller, a Norwegian designer who wrote a book about the font, has called Helvetica ‘the perfume of the city’, while Massimo Vignelli, who first advocated its use on the New York Subway in the 1960s (more than twenty years before it happened), believes its versatility enables the user to say in a variety of ways, ‘with if you want to be really fancy … with the if it’s really intensive and passionate’. And its appeal is global. In Brussels it is employed throughout the city’s transport system. In London the National Theatre has adopted it too, so comprehensively – on its posters, programmes, advertising and signs – that it rivals Johnston’s Underground as London’s strongest corporate presence.
Only Paris seemed (slightly) resistant to Helvetica’s charms. One can find it everywhere on the streets, but an attempt to introduce it underground was less successful. In the Métro it was tried out in the time between Alphabet Metro and Parisine, but in a mish-mash of styles, combining several old and new weights, and it wasn’t popular. The problem with Helvetica in a city notably immune to a uniformity of type was that it just wasn’t French.
To say Helvetica is ‘ubiqui
tous’ is almost like saying cars are everywhere these days. The better observation is that it is ubiquitous because it fulfils so many demands for modern type. So what is it that sets Helvetica apart?
On an emotional plane it serves several functions. It has geographical baggage, its Swiss heritage laying a backdrop of impartiality, neutrality and freshness (it helps at this point if you think of Switzerland as a place of Alps/cow bells/spring flowers rather than Zurich and its erstwhile heroin problem). The font also manages to convey honesty and invite trust, while its quirks distinguish it from anything that portrays overbearing authority; even in corporate use it maintains a friendly homeliness. It wasn’t designed with these intentions – it was intended merely as a clean, useful alphabet, and something that would portray important information in the clearest fashion. It wasn’t meant for homewares store (where it appears with narrow spacing); it was meant for ICI’s Schools Liaison Section poster of the periodic table (where it appears in the perfect bold display of upper and lower case – for and Hg for mercury).
On the technical level it looks as if it was designed with some wit, and certainly with the human hand. Like other Swiss designs, it appears that the inner white shapes serve as a firm guide to the black around them, an aspect that one designer called ‘a locked-in rightness’.* The majority of its distinguishing features are in lower case: a has a slightly pregnant teardrop belly and a tail; and u have much smaller tails, but they still demand attention in a sans serif face; and s each have straight horizontal endings; the i and j have square dots. On the upper deck, the G has both a horizontal and vertical bar at a right-angle, Q has a short straight angled cross-line like a cigarette in an ashtray, and R has a little kicker for its right leg.
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