![]() And since the dawning of the digital age, it's been ubiquitous on software, apps and websites everywhere.īut given this widespread use – which has been criticised as overuse by leading typographers such as Erik Spiekermann – designers will often seek an alternative to Helvetica to avoid their work looking too samey and predictable. There's even been a popular film about it. Helvetica has also been widely used in road and railway signage, from the UK and USA to Japan and South Korea. Some of the most recognisable uses of Helvetica have been on US tax forms, EU warnings on tobacco products, and in wordmarks, including American Airlines, BMW, Sears, Microsoft, Panasonic, Target and Verizon. Like the Swiss nation itself, designers loved its neutrality, making it almost infinitely adaptable for all kinds of projects. And it quickly became one of the most popular typefaces of the mid-20th century. Originally called Neue Haas Grotesk, the sans-serif, neo-grotesque typeface was designed by Swiss designers Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann in 1957. ![]() If not, I have more.Helvetica is one of the best-known and most-used fonts in the history of modern typography. If the metal block goes in a different case, it is a different font.Ĭheers, Trevor, and I hope these links help you with the info you are looking for. A font is one typeface, one type style, and one type size, so 12 pt Helvetica Bold is not the same font as 10 pt Helvetica Bold. Oh, one more, just as ppi and dpi get interchanged wrongly, people misuse the word font. What else do you want to know about fonts? OT was a joint venture with MS, but Adobe OT fonts have more features. This site about Adobe Postscript fonts may help to further your research:Ībout the time of CS3, Adobe finished converting their fonts to OpenType. Helvetica and Helvetica Neue are not the same! This site shows the difference:ĭid you watch the awesome movie Helvetica? I would not use those for professional printing, but I use them in Office documents, as I know most people will have them and it won't change on another computer. That's why I refuse to use Arial and Times New Roman, and was glad when even Microsoft stopped using them and came up with Calibri and Cambria. The same goes for Times New Roman (TT), being an imitation of the PostScript font Times. It is a spin-off, a knock-off, an imitation of the very good PostScript Helvetica for people unwilling to pay for the original. Helvetica was one of the 13 Adobe PostScript fonts.Īrial did not come out until TrueType, many years later. So 2K for the printer and another 2K for the Postscript boards. But if you used one of the 13, you were paying for an exact match with what the print shop had. There were 13 Adobe Postscript fonts, and if you wanted more they had to be purchased. My first PostScript printer also came with a card that went in the computer. When I started in this business, fonts were hard-wired into the printer. Not even close! The e is close, but the second is wider. They look nothing alike!Īnd then look at the a and the r and the t in your next example. Trevor, compare the G and the R in your Helvetica and Arial examples. Wikipedia's Helvetica page on the font is remarkably light on graphic content. The last time we were asked about Helvetica, I did some investigating, and came away no better off than before I started. It still annoyed me deeply that I had to go to that much trouble! In my case I had CS6 installed on my laptop, so was able to copy and transfer the font files to my desktop. If you have a pre CC version of CS6 installed, then you will have the old fonts. I went as far as emailing the TypeKit team about it a while back, and was fobbed off with a meaningless reply. Getting back to your question, Photoshop used to have a range of Swiss type faces that could have been used for the sort of banner headline applications Helvetica is associated with, but that has also gone. Bickham Script Pro, for instance, is a font used by one of my wine producing clients, so I was not impressed when that disappeared after CS6. I was excited when TypeKit was introduced, but later became disillusioned when I realised how many useful fonts were no longer available with CC. ![]() It has pretty much become a font class nowadays, but there are sans serif fonts in Photoshop that will do the trick. Further to what you have already been told, you might like to check the Wikipedia entry for Helvetica
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