Student: V. Lee Brady
Instructor’s Name: Dr. Sullivan
Course Title: Art620
Fall semester 2009
The Culture of Type
Exploring the cultural impact of three typeface: Futura, Gil San, Helvetica. The choice was a hard one, with so many great type faces to chose from. I open a type book, browsed and three days later still browsing. Two weeks later still browsing. I threw up my hand, and picked the most popular
typefaces that came to my mind. As one, who is part of the USA pop culture of late 20th and early 21st century. These fonts came to my mind because they were ever present, easy to remember, often used, modern and easy to identify.
Futura is a sans-serif type font created in betwen 1924 and 1926[1] by Paul Renner a German typeface designer.
Renner based his design on strong geometrical shapes similar to those found in Bauhaus design styles. Renner was a modernist though, not associated with Bauhaus, but shared a belief that modern typefaces should express modern model. Futura has the appearance of efficiency. Eliminating non-essential elements or decorative frills. Geometrical in it’s approach, using squares,circle and triangles. This can be seen, when you examine the “O’s, Q’s,” they are near perfect round circles. The lowercase a and g, which can be found in Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic, also demonstrate this geometric style. Tall ascender are used in the lowercase which ascend above the cap line. Futura is very popular with designers, It can be found in many different print and digital projects.
Ikea and Opel to name a few have based multimillion dollar campaign featuring this font.
Gil Sans is a humanist san-serif type face created in 1926 by sculptor, graphic artist and type designer Eric gill, who worked for and was influenced by Edward Johnston, who design the typeface for the London Underground. Monotype Corp was the main promotor of this type, making it a near standard in England. Ben Archer
“‘Q. How do you do British post-war design?
A. Set it in Gill Sans and print it in British Racing Green’ “ [2]. The world also embraced, this less stif
f than Futura typeface, it had a unique letterforms Q, R, a, g and t, Gill Sans has a small x-height, smaller then Helvetica or Futura., but still was able to maintain legibility due to its design was based off of
roman letterform, rather than geometric shapes. More characters can be set in a given space when using Gill Sans than with most other sans serif designs.
Helvetica, a sans-serif typeface created in 1957 by Swiss designer Max Meidinger, Originally called Die Neue Haas Grotesk, was changed by Stempel the Germany parent company,
to Helvetica (derived from Confoederatio Helvetica, the Latin name for Switzerland) short for Swiss. Helvetica was created to compete against Akzidenz-Grotesk, with a more modern, neutral typeface with greater clarity.
Helvetica is a very popular font and at times seems to be everywhere. It's been used in countless corporate logos, including those of American Airlines, Panasonic, Crate and Barrel, Target, BMW, Tupperware, the Gap, Nestlé, ConEd, Verizon, Toyota, Sears, North Face, Staples, Panasonic, Evian, and the IRS tax form. You can spot it on billboards, album covers, and directional signs, throughout america.
The beautiful blandness of Helvetica is its strength. Neither pro nor con or controversial. It’s the font that get the least negative response or
feedback when used. It seem so corporate. "It's hard to see how to improve Helvetica. It just seems exactly right."[3] Matthew Carter, designer of Microsoft's Verdana and Georgia typefaces. The font has its critics like David Carson, surfer turned designer, who made a career as well as changed the type world by mangling, distorting , eroding existing fonts type. Also, Eric Spiekermann, German typographer whose dislikes of the Swiss font, calling it "familiar, predictable, dull, overused, corporatist, and conformist.".[4] Ultimately, Helvetica is a chameleon, you put it in a setting and it seems to blend in.
Bibliography
1. Written by Nicholas Fabian on December 15, 2000
http://www.creativepro.com/article/the-bauhaus-designer-paul-renner
2. Burke, Christopher, Paul Renner: The Art of Typography. London: HyphenPress, 1998.
ISBN 0-907259-12-X.
3. The Helvetica Hegemony By Mia Fineman,— article in Slate, published May 25, 2007
4. The Helvetica Hegemony By Mia Fineman,— article in Slate, published May 25, 2007
5. Ikea weekly catalog- June 30, 2009
6. pages 48-49 of Eric Gill’s An Essay on Typography. 1993
7. screen capture - V. lee Brady- Verizon website 2009
8. Crate & Barrel, Scottsdale, Arizona 2009
