Helvetica: the universal font

 

            Most of the people don’t pay much attention or just not that aware on small things that actually bring or give impact to the society or to the environment we live in. To tell you the truth, I do consider myself one of them. To support that decree, just recently on our multimedia class, our facilitator advised us to watch a documentary film titled “Helvetica”, a typeface. What I thought that time was that the film would be another Steve Jobs kind of drama that would only showcase the evolution of a font and the success of its developer. And that thought didn’t give me any interest to watch it. And also considering the fact that the film was called a documentary, which registered on my vocabulary as synonymous with the term “boring”, was not that exciting to hear. However, I’m ashamed to realize that I made a wrong judgment on the film particularly on its subject.

            Helvetica, as what I mentioned earlier is a kind of font that made the world more appealing than it was before. Well, for those people like me who are not that keen observant, the Helvetica font face is just around announcing, leading, guiding, showing, directing us since the year of its birth. You will find Helvetica posing with the models on billboards, moving together with the cars, helping Nestle, Oral-B and any other products / companies to reach their peak. In short, Helvetica is the reason why effective commercialization existed.

            Isn’t it amazing to know this thing gained a reputation so great than the reputation a prominent person is keeping? And isn’t it interesting to realize that it is just a font? So how this font did achieved the status she is enjoying now? As what I learned on the documentary, Helvetica font is just a very simple font and a serious one. A font that never showed any emotions or expressions…a font that never designed to stand among the others and be famous…a font created for sole reason, to be straightforward. This is the reason why most of the companies all over the world prefer to use Helvetica font family on their logos and printout product advertisements. According to them, this font never outshines the product or the company it represents.

            I also read an article on the web wherein I found out that the known font “Arial” is an impostor of Helvetica. That means Helvetica created first before Arial. Since Helvetica is not downloadable for free, Arial set up its way to stardom. This is the reason why for youngsters on this generation (I’m raising my left hand!) are more familiar with Arial than Helvetica. For those who can’t afford to buy a license for Helvetica, they use Arial as an alternative. Well, the differences of Arial from Helvetica aren’t noticeable. Just like what I did on this article! I used both Arial and Helvetica... did you notice?

            Helvetica, to sum up all, is a universal font. Universal not because most of the people use it, universal because you can see and encounter it everyday and everywhere. Helvetica proved that simplicity is truly beauty. Well, after viewing the film, now I can say that typography isn’t boring at all.