The typeface has also been used for a number of company logos and branding campaigns, such as American Apparel, Lufthansa, Crate & Barrel, and Panasonic, and in wayfinding systems like New York City's subway system by the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). Helvetica has become a go-to font in recent decades – the typeface had its own documentary released in 2007. "We wanted that size-specific detail back." Monotype's overhaul involved rounding the style of characters in the typeface "Pre-digital Helveticas had subtle-but-important adjustments for small, medium, and large sizes," he continued. "Neue Helvetica was designed for one size that was optimized to work well in text," Nix said. It also uses a lot less resources compared to the current fonts.Related story Monotype overhauls London Underground's 100-year-old Johnston typeface Such high flexible ability helps the characters to adjust to fit varying sizes and proportions of display screens, from large to small, high definition to low definition.
No matter whether they are used on print media or display screens, especially nowadays when there’s an incredible variety of gadgets and display technologies. Suppakit Chalermlarp: The variable font technology enables designers to have more fun using all these different characters because it grants everyone endless possibilities. This was before it was later developed into the One variable font file technology, which includes every width and weight within the font’s variation axis. The conversation grants us a better understanding in grasping the variable font, which was born from the mutual agreement between big tech companies including Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and Google in 2016. This is a part of Suppakit’s insights and opinions about the typeface. Recently after the launch of Helvetica Now Variable, we had a chance to talk with Suppakit Chalermlarp, the co-founder of Katatrad, a type design studio and Thailand’s leading digital type foundry. Particularly at a size smaller than 6 points, such as the small display screens of smart watches or smartphones. But the most crucial reason behind their decision to readjust the font that had been heavily used by almost every sector was due to the fact that Helvetica becomes difficult to read when used in smaller spaces. When digitalised, these alternatives were not included, hence the Monotype team’s attempt to bring them back.
Even the punctuation had different variations, from sharp to round edges. For instance, the ‘R’ with had a straight leg whereas the ‘a’ was actually the letter ‘d’ with no leg, and the clean ‘U’ was found without any additional projection. They discovered that in the first thirty years, some of the Latin letters of the Helvetica typeface had more than one variable to use. They looked up and found the design process, the hot lead typesetting technique, as well as the transportation of the type metals to different countries including various ways about how the font had been used. They researched the information and traced back the font’s first version designed by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann back in 1957. Back in 2015, Monotype’s team of font designers at the studio’s Germany office were developing an idea for a new version of Helvetica. Before we dive deeper into the story of Helvetica Now Variable, let’s go back and talk about Helvetica Now.