COMM 207: Exciting news! A typeface's birthday

Today's editing exercise will be shortened a little because of a story I saw this morning in The Chicago Tribune. I know you'll be disappointed by that, but this is big! It's huge! Helvetica type, the face you see on everything from airplanes to Beemer ads and your 1040 tax form, is 50 years old this month.

In a syndicated story picked up by The Trib, Vanessa Gezari of the St. Petersburg Times went looking for "signs of age: the slightest sag in a once-pert C, the slope that can creep into the shoulders of an M, the struggle for balance -- almost imperceptible to the untrained eye -- in the limbs of a solidly built K."

But she didn't find any!

"Time has been good to Helvetica," she said. "Very good."

Some people just hate Helvetica (maybe partly because of the tax forms)? But others love it. You should be warned that grown men can get misty-eyed and sentimental about a well-turned typeface. (You also should know your journalism instructor has been a fanatic about typography ever since he worked with master Linotype operators during the 1970s, admired what skilled craftmen they were and learned from them a little bit of the craft of newspaper production.) Gezari's story explains why Helvetica is considered "the typographical signature of the modern era."

Gezari also explains, along the way, what to look for in a typeface and some of the psychology behind typography. There's a lot more to it than you'd think.

One thing the online version of the Trib's article doesn't have is a good picture of Helvetica. But Linotype GmbH, owner of the type house that developed the face in 1957, has type specimens and a brief overview in its online type gallery. Wikipedia has a brief and reliable history of Linotype, indexed under its former (and better-known) name Mergenthaler Linotype Co.