In the 1980s, Linotype rationalized all the disparate Helvetica faces (the old metal types, the short-lived phototypesetting fonts and the digital versions) into one large new family, which it called . This is predominantly the type we see everywhere today, although in some cases we may not recognize it as being related to the original font, such is the range of weights. There are fifty-one different styles to choose from at Linotype.com, including some that hardly look like the original at all: ,
In Bloomsbury, in the shadow of the British Museum, the office of Simon Learman is covered in Helvetica. Learman is joint executive creative director at McCann Erickson, and since he took up this post in 2006 he has been involved in campaigns for , the only airline not to have changed its core typeface in more than forty years. It is, of course, in Helvetica, usually in red (American) and blue (Airlines). For a while, PanAm used Helvetica too, but one now associates the font instantly with its one-time rival.
On one wall of Learman’s office there are a number of showcards with his recent hits. His work for Heinz Salad Cream uses a type that is also rooted in the 1950s, but slightly washed out, linking it with endless summers and post-war austerity. Next to it, Heinz Big Soup is sold with a bloated font, full of its own cud-chewing goodness. These are specialist types carefully sourced from the online directories. But next to them are bold Helvetica capitals offering above a photograph of a wide leather seat, and above a photo of two bottles of wine and a window on a cloudless sky. These are newspaper adverts, and have an unusually large amount of text, chiselled in the shape of skyscrapers. the first of these ads begins. ‘Imagine floating high above the earth cocooned in your own perfect little world …’ The seduction – about ergonomically designed pods and a highly indulgent cabin crew, and lots of puns about ‘a long stretch’ – goes on for quite a while, and beneath it, in bold italics, are the facts: how many flights a day, the many gateway cities and the website address.
Helvetica has familiarity on its side, but it is also still inherently useful in selling a tiring day of travel. ‘The thinking was,’ Simon Learman says, ‘that it has to compete against the British Airways brand, which is majestic “Britain at its best”, and Virgin, which is “rock’n’roll and rock star lifestyle”. So with this campaign we tried to evoke what travel used to be like. The luxury of the 1950s, early 60s, a little bit Mad Men. The American Airlines position was that they flew more New Yorkers than anyone else, so by dint of the fact that New Yorkers are difficult … if we can keep New Yorkers happy then we can keep you happy.’ Helvetica has come to represent getting things done efficiently. ‘It’s about getting to your meeting on time and getting the deal, but it’s also about using the type to be very businesslike in the way the ad talks to you.’
Learman gets out some other cards from a cupboard, a campaign that didn’t run. ‘This is one of those heartbreakers,’ he says. Here, the type itself is the message: on one advert the A extending itself until it turns into a long seat, on another two As forming themselves into the legs of a trestle table to emphasize the amount of working space on a business flight. ‘American really liked the idea, but they were nervous that it may invite people to start playing with their logo and damage their reputation.’
Helvetica might not rock but it has a message
In 1957, when Helvetica still had its old name and was yet to make its mark on the world, the French type foundry Deberny & Peignot announced what it hoped would be a new and revolutionary font: . Called upon to explain the name, its Swiss-born designer Adrian Frutiger explained that it was almost called Galaxy and then Universal. But Univers was the perfect aggrandizing title for a font designed to replace the fading Futura as the ultimate symbol of a new Europe, for a font that could lay claim to being . It is still a wonderful thing. Univers doesn’t age or sag, and everything you say with it will have a .
Frutiger, born in the picturesque Swiss Oberland in 1928, is one of the great type theorists. He asserts that type has the power ‘to make the whole world of thought legible simply by re-arranging the same letters over and over again’, and Univers was his first great vehicle. In 1957 Deberny & Peignot launched it with a Madison Avenue-style slogan: ‘: a synthesis of Swiss thoroughness, French elegance and British precision in pattern manufacture.’ The phrase gives itself away in its vocabulary: most type designers before Univers thought they were making an alphabet; but in the emerging age of phototypesetting it is the pattern that is all the rage.
The font had a long and painstaking gestation. In 1952, Frutiger was headhunted by D&P to develop new fonts for its Lumitype system, a novel phototypesetting machine that stored the impressions of a keyboard as binary figures in a computer memory bank. In many ways a forerunner to the desktop computer, it speeded composition, achieved new levels of accuracy, and extended the options of the designer. The process did not become as successful as its rivals but it led to some wonderful fonts. The machine required that each typeface appear on a separate interchangeable disk, and so Frutiger, then only twenty-four but already gaining a reputation as a leading young designer in Switzerland, took the train to France and started work.
Not long after his arrival, he rushed out a few minor works: and , the former a , the latter a thick-nibbed calligraphic font with Arabic overtones. But then, over a period of four years, Frutiger created , a font that chimed perfectly with what we understand to be the pinnacle of cool European modernism – sans serif, inspiration from Roman capitals, a smoothness and harmony, a uniformity of height both in capitals and lower case, and horizontally cut curved ends (known as ‘finals’, a trait that Univers shares with Helvetica, most noticeable on the C and S; earlier san serifs had diagonal cuts).
The British type designer Stanley Morison, originator of Times New Roman, called Univers ‘the least bad’ sans serif face, while others disapproved of its slightly chilly quality. Some objected to a ‘mistake’ on the lower-case g, with the ending of its open tail being too close to the bowl. But if you wanted to go somewhere in safety in the new Europe of the 1950s, then Univers was for you.
Adrian Frutiger (seated) checking his Univers
There is a telling photograph of Frutiger in a large light room in Paris looking at a big board of his Univers letters. He sits on a stool with his back to the camera while a man in a white labcoat stands besides the board, seemingly waiting instructions. It is like an eye examination, but one where the patient is so relaxed that he has stopped looking at the A and B, and is looking at the space that surrounds them separately and jointly, and the qualities that link those letters to an M or an S or a V.
The photo marks the point when the design of type moved from something performed primarily with the eye through the hand, to something that resulted from science. Virtuosity and beauty were no longer the things. Now there was a calibrated measuring chart on which visibility and legibility would be tracked with precision. Men in labcoats and clipboards were now defining our alphabet – a long way from Gutenberg, Caslon or Baskerville.
Once it was scientifically proven, Frutiger demonstrated his creation by using the word Monde, hinting at great ambitions. His font appeared on signs and instructions and advertising, the whole family spanning a vast range of twenty-one weights, from to , its availability extending far beyond Lumitype to the traditional hot-metal casting of Monotype and Linotype machines, an expansion requiring the carving of 35,000 individual punches.
Univers made public appearances across Europe over the next half century, notably in London, where Westminster adopted for its street signs; Munich, which chose it as the face of its 1972 Olympics; and Paris, where, being at least part French, it was a natural for the updating of the Métro. The choice was later echoed by the Montréal Métro and the San Francisco BART.
The schedule of events from the 1972 Munich Olympics
The font remains in wide use and its clarity has found a lasting role on Rand McNally and Ordnance Survey maps, at General Electric and Deutsche Bank – and on Apple’s keyboards (until
they turned to VAG Rounded in 2007). But, despite being regarded by many as superior to Helvetica in legibility and contrast, it has not achieved Helvetica’s lasting fame and superstar status. It is not the subject of T-shirts or documentary films.
Frutiger himself blames the font’s (relative) decline on production methods: Univers achieved its finest results in its original hot metal, while the adaptations to more modern photo- and laser-setting systems were inexactly realized. But there are other reasons – notably the snowballing effect of public taste. Like no font before or after it, Helvetica achieved a tipping point, and it shows no sign of waning. Wherever you go, there it is.
Mention your admiration of Univers – or even Helvetica – to a font enthusiast and they are quite likely to respond by talking about Frutiger. Frutiger is the typeface that many typographers believe is the finest ever made for signs and directions. And the reason Frutiger is better than Adrian Frutiger’s previous exceptional sans serif, Univers? Because Univers, although a milestone in font design, can be a little rigid and strict: a Univers lower-case e, for example, is almost a circle with a cut in it, both precise and scary. Whereas Frutiger is perfect.
Frutiger was just twenty eight when he designed Univers, and it displays signs of being an intellectual exercise. By the time he created Frutiger, he was in his fifties, surer of his place in the world, his hand more relaxed. His new font had a more humane feel, with a few details that have no mathematical logic, but just please the eye. Considering its predominant use on information boards, it is unusually warm and welcoming.
The font was designed for Roissy Airport in the early 1970s, before its renaming as Paris Charles de Gaulle. It had to look clear and concise on illuminated boards and signs with yellow backgrounds, and it began life with Frutiger cutting out black paper to make the words and . Particular attention was given to the need to read words at an angle, and to calculations of size: a letter ten centimetres high was required to be legible at twenty metres. The Frutiger arrow was forceful but squat, almost square. He viewed the whole project as creating ‘an arrivals and departure machine’.
Roissy Airport – the original terminus for Frutigerland
Frutiger was all for aesthetics in his work, but something else was paramount. ‘If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape,’ he told his admirers at a type conference in 1990. ‘The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page … When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful.’
Like Helvetica and Univers, Frutiger is getting dangerously hard to avoid. It has become a standard information bearer at many large institutions, especially universities. It has evolved into a large family, with a serif version and many weights and italics, and Frutiger Stones offering thick playful letters within an irregular pebble shape just begging to be made into fizzy sweets. And it has come to the aid of sports commentators.
Square-shouldered American football players usually trot onto the field with Collegiate or Varsity on their backs – rectangular and chunky fonts matching their physiques. But Europeans seldom appear in their national type. The Germans wouldn’t be seen in or Futura, but commonly wear (American), while the French are just as happy with Optima (German) as with The Portuguese and Brazilians have scored with something close to Univers (Swiss), while the Argentinians have tackled (America out of Germany). The England football team have appeared with between their shoulders, although they’ve settled in recent years on something approaching which is French. Perhaps they should give a run.
These fonts tend not to be the choice of the midfield general, but of Adidas, Nike or Umbro, who will buy a famous type and tweak it to make it theirs. In the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, the winners, Spain, wore Unity, created by Yomar Augusto for Adidas. But increasingly the default setting in the domestic leagues has been or , the easiest way to read a name from the back of the east stand upper.
Antique Olive, Univers and ITC Bauhaus – not a bad strike force
A similar uniformity has tempered European travel. Frutiger could almost be called World Airport, such is its growing influence and acceptance. In 2000 you would land at Heathrow, and the signs to passport control would be in a very British customized Bembo, with grand serifs. That alone was enough to confirm you had landed in the right place. Fly into Heathrow today and you will be in , or a lightly customized form of it. The United States has so far resisted its charms, hanging on to Helvetica, but most of Europe has adopted it.
But a default can be a good thing, especially if it gets your luggage back.
At the time when Switzerland was giving birth to Helvetica and Univers, an Englishman called Jock Kinneir and a South African woman, Margaret Calvert, were creating a parallel revolution in Britain. If you do any driving in Europe, in Britain or Ireland, Spain or Portugal, Denmark or Iceland, you will be entirely familiar with their work. For it is their lettering, that is used on almost all of these countries’ motorway signs. It appears, too, in places as far afield as China and Egypt and Dubai, for signs with English translations. And Kinneir and Calvert did something else important: they established that it is a lot easier to read lower-case letters than capitals when travelling at speed.
Calvert was born in Durban in 1936, and one of the first things she remembers after arriving in Britain as a teenager is being taken to London’s South Bank to see the Festival of Britain, a symbol of the future. She now lives in Islington, north London, a nice quiet townhouse if it wasn’t for the fact that visitors are continually reminded of children crossing, and men at work, and the possibility of cows becoming part of the proceedings at any time. Triangular warning traffic signs are littered around her front room and in the hallway. The girl taking the boy by the hand? That was Calvert’s memory of herself as a schoolgirl. The pictogram of a man digging earth to indicate roadworks (or struggling to open an umbrella, in popular mythology)? That was Calvert’s work, too. ‘The people in charge now have messed things up,’ she says, as she shows me the differences between her original children and the digital ones we have now.
Margaret Calvert at home with her road signs
Calvert fell into her career by accident. She was at Chelsea School of Art, not quite deciding between painting and illustration, when a visiting lecturer noticed her diligence. This was Jock Kinneir, a well-regarded designer who had just set up his own business. Calvert had enjoyed some of his previous assignments in class, not least the task of designing a new promotional leaflet for the Battersea Fun Fair. The fair, a rather tawdry offshoot from its elegant birth as the Battersea Pleasure Gardens in 1951, offered the Big Dipper and the Wheel of Death, and a place to make your own spin paintings. It had changed a bit since it opened as part of the Festival of Britain, but it was still an exciting and popular attraction (at least until children started dying on its rides), and its fantasies were mostly those of speed and space. It was a place where a young artist could express her creativity.
Impressed with Calvert’s work as a student, in 1957 Kinneir asked her to help him with a larger project with similar themes: the signs at the new Gatwick Airport. Kinneir’s own experience of this kind of thing was related to designing the pavilions at the Festival of Britain and exhibition stands at Wembley. He hadn’t applied for the job – he got it after chatting to one of Gatwick’s architects, David Allford, at a Green Line bus stop on their way to work. Still, how hard could it be to design a panel saying ‘Departures’?
In his initial report, Kinneir listed a few typefaces that might work, among them Gill Sans. But none proved ideal, so he started from scratch, much influenced by Edward Johnston’s letters for the London Underground. Calvert remembers the end result as ‘a rather inelegant but nevertheless very clear’ hybrid between Johnston and Monotype Grotesque 216.
The opening of the airport was a success, and few paid much attention to the appearance of the signs, which is as it sho
uld be (the directions were printed white on green). But one person who did notice them was Colin Anderson, the chairman of P&O Orient. He asked Kinneir to design the luggage labels for passengers taking his cruise ships. ‘If you get noticed for signs,’ Calvert says, ‘that’s what you become. The work just snowballed. The labels were designed specifically for illiterate porters, making it easy for them to identify baggage by colour and shape.’
But it was Colin Anderson’s next job that made Kinneir and Calvert famous. In 1957, Anderson was appointed chairman of the committee to advise on motorway road signs. The first stage of what was to become the M1, between London and Yorkshire, was under construction, and there was a lot of new information to display at speed. Anderson’s committee appointed Kinneir as their design consultant.
He and Calvert were offered a little guidance: ‘I am anxious you shouldn’t embark upon inventing an alphabet of a character quite “new”,’ Anderson wrote in a letter in June 1958. ‘We have as a committee got into the habit of accepting the general weight and appearance of the German alphabet as being the sort of thing we need.’
‘It was a request which we chose to ignore,’ Calvert remembers. The German alphabet referred to was , the plainest of faces used for autobahns and West German number plates. It was developed in the 1920s, with strokes of even thickness aiding readability. Engineers felt comfortable with it, not least because it bore no trace of artistry and got you where you needed to go. But Kinneir and Calvert believed DIN to be too crude, and thought it would not fit well within the softer English landscape.
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