11 Facts About Helvetica

Helvetica's goal is to design a new sans serif font that can compete in the Swiss market, as a neutral font that should not be given any additional meaning.

The main influence on Helvetica was Akzidenz-Grotesk from Berthold; Hoffman's scrapbook of proofs of the design shows careful comparison of test proofs with snippets of Akzidenz-Grotesk.

The design was popular: Paul Shaw suggests that Helvetica "began to muscle out" Akzidenz-Grotesk in New York City from around summer 1965, when Amsterdam Continental, which imported European typefaces, stopped pushing Akzidenz-Grotesk in its marketing and began to focus on Helvetica instead.

The rights to Helvetica are now held by Monotype Imaging, which acquired Linotype; the Neue Haas Grotesk digitisation was co-released with Font Bureau.

In 2007, director Gary Hustwit released a documentary film, Helvetica, to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the typeface.

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Large number of variants of Helvetica were rapidly released to expand on its popularity, including new weights and languages.

Neue Helvetica uses a numerical design classification scheme, like Univers.

Derivative designs based on Helvetica were rapidly developed, taking advantage of the lack of copyright protection in the phototypesetting font market of the 1960s onward.

Florian Hardwig has described its display-oriented styles, with tight spacing, as more reminiscent of Helvetica as used in the 1970s from cold type than any official Helvetica digitisation.

Microsoft's "Helv" design, later known as "MS Sans Serif", is a sans-serif typeface that shares many key characteristics to Helvetica, including the horizontally and vertically aligned stroke terminators and more-uniform stroke widths within a glyph.

Some fonts based on Helvetica are intended for different purposes and have clearly different designs.