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'Godfather' of Helvetica font, Mike Parker, dies at 84
- iratedev 13y agoI never understood the fascination with Helvetica. It looks nice, sure, but there has to be more to it than that.
- rkuykendall-com 13y agoWatch the documentary. Helvetica is like air, or water. It's the font when you choose don't want to choose a font, because It says absolutely nothing.
- 80 13y agoIn theory. In reality it's got a ton of cultural baggage.
- bluthru 13y agoThat's an opinion, not fact. I'd say it's closer to vanilla: So versatile and distinct that it was elevated to ubiquity. Your average person would have a hard time telling you when helvetica was created or when vanilla ice cream was created. That's an achievement.
- ChristianBundy 13y agoThat's an opinion, not fact.
- bluthru 13y agoNever claimed it to be one.
- midas007 13y agoUbiquity is itself a message. Each font has a personality that effects the impression of a work. So there's no escaping a work sending no message at all, except by not meeting deadlines. :)
- iratedev 13y ago> because It says absolutely nothing. Much like your post
- serf 13y agoI never really understood the fascination with typography beyond a readability standard to be honest, but that's why i'm not a designer.
- panacea 13y agoDo you code in comic sans?
- rprospero 13y agoI don't code in Comic Sans. I code in whatever the default font is for my editor. As an experiment, I just tried shifting the editor's font to Comic Sans and writing some code. Did really feel any different to me. Obviously it didn't change any unit tests, but I didn't feel any subjective differences, either. Oddly enough, since I didn't write down what the default font was, I'll probably be coding in Comic Sans for the foreseeable future. If this becomes an issue, I guess that I'll switch fonts, but, at the moment, I still don't understand what the big deal is. For the record, I'm not trying to be snarky. I was really hoping that switching my editor to comic sans would enlighten me on the difference between using a "good" font and a "bad" font, but I still don't see it.
- panacea 13y agoSo you're happy to code in a non-monospaced font. I can't help but think you're being wilfully ignorant... or just being a contrarian. Either way, good luck.
- rbilgil 13y agoYou said you only care about readability. But readability is one of the only reasons we code in "monospaced" fonts, because although they don't look as nice, it's very difficult to confuse capital I's with l's and 0's with O's. Also surely you get the sense of informalness that comes from Comic Sans? Do you at least understand why it looks silly on something like a "DANGER, HIGH VOLTAGE" sign
- 13y ago
- 51Cards 13y agoHe was also a founder of Bitstream. Quite the career.
- Chronic26 13y agoWhy the hell does this matter?
- candeira 13y agoThe Evian and Skype logos are definitely not typeset in Helvetica.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- quesera 13y agoI also question the Sears and Microsoft logos. The thing about Helvetica -- its essential character -- is in its directness and balance and understatedness and purity, modulo a few well-known quirks (e.g. capital R). When you perturb that (rounded terminals for Skype, fucked up "e" and "a" for Evian, block-skew-italic and glyph mods for Microsoft) I feel like you lose the whole point of the typeface. "Based on Helvetica" is not Helvetica.
- Springtime 13y agoAlthough Evian isn't, the Skype logo is based on some customized variant of Helvetica Rounded. Other logos that clearly aren't Helvetica are the the Crate & Barrel logo pictured in the article, which is Arial, and the American Airlines typeface which appears to be a customized Frutiger (although the old version of the logo was set in Helvetica). It's a perfectly great typeface, but far too overused.
- mortenjorck 13y agoCrate & Barrel definitely does use Helvetica, but their logo has one of the more... idiosyncratic alternates in the history of its use. That geometrically circular 'C' has always irked me, but it wouldn't be Crate & Barrel without it.
- Springtime 13y agoThe actual company logo [1] uses Helvetica (apart from that bizarre 'C'), however the font printed on the back of the plate seen in the article [2] is definitely Arial. Note all the angled terminations. [1] http://myrevuze.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/crate_and_barrel_logo_01.jpg http://myrevuze.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/crate_and_bar... [2] http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/140227182036-02-helvetica-crate-and-barrel-horizontal-gallery.jpg http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/140227182036-02-helv...
- fennecfoxen 13y ago> Words printed in Helvetica tell you what stop you're at on the New York subway. Yes, sometimes, but I prefer it when the original signs tell me what sign I'm at on the New York City Subway: IRT: http://instagram.com/p/fBVpruQAcE/ http://instagram.com/p/fBVpruQAcE/ BMT: http://instagram.com/p/e0mRuswAY3/ http://instagram.com/p/e0mRuswAY3/ IND: http://instagram.com/p/fBV83vQAci/ http://instagram.com/p/fBV83vQAci/
- brannon 13y agoEdit - that's what I get for reading comments before the article. But the dictionary is on Netflix, and worth watching.
- quarterwave 13y agoWhat's really great about Helvetica is that it's idiot-proof on a wide variety of browsers, and given my limited web-design experience that puts Helvetica in the "Swiss" category of robust design. I personally prefer a more evenly kerned quasi-typewriter font like Inconsolata, but it takes a lot of work to get it looking right on all browsers.
- austinhutch 13y agoI've started to spend a lot of time on HN and enjoy the community despite not being a very strong developer. The discussion here though seems to highlight a divide. This is Helvetica! You can not understate its importance! If I were to try and translate this for the HN crowd I would compare Helvetica to whatever you consider to be the greatest framework of all time. We stand on the shoulders of giants and Mike Parker is one of them.
- nzp 13y agoApart from two (two!) comments, of which one is [dead], expressing confusion about why this is important, there seems to be no divide. There's really no need to translate anything to "HN crowd" (by that I assume you really mean hacker community in general). Competent programmers (hackers) and really highly technical and highly competent people tend to appreciate good design (not just graphical design, but design in general) even if they don't know particularities of it. It's a matter of taste, and good taste is objective (PG already articulated this better than I could do[1] [2]). A couple of anecdotes: - TeX came to be because Donald Knuth was horribly annoyed with the low quality of then nascent digital typography in the first edition of The Art of Computer Programming. AMS Euler[3] typeface is a product of his collaboration with Hermann Zapf. - The first practical application of Unix was to run the typesetting in troff for technical documentation at Bell Labs. [1] http://paulgraham.com/goodart.html http://paulgraham.com/goodart.html [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler
- normloman 13y agoIt's just a font, man. Chill.
- radio4fan 13y ago> You can not understate its importance! Challenge accepted! It's not important. ;-)
- rayval 13y agoI have a fond memory of Mike, with his cheery wicked smile, on a sunny afternoon riding in an open convertible, charging through traffic-clogged streets in Boston, heading over to the Bitstream offices, blasting powerful classical music (unfamiliar to me, who only knew blues and rock) on a crystal-clear sound system, which reverberated off the office buildings downtown, while Mike punctuated the music with sharp wit, deftly negotiating near-collisions at high speed. For a poignant account of his later years, and his struggle with Alzheimers, see the blog written by his ex-wife and steady friend, Sybil Masquelier. The entry "The Farewell Tour" describes their final trip to New York in 2011 to receive the Type Designers Club lifetime achievement award. http://mikeparkerfontgod.blogspot.com/ http://mikeparkerfontgod.blogspot.com/
- rlx0x 13y agoThe impact of Helvetica is quite significant, there even is a documentary about it, called Helvetica! check it out its really great. (It includes an interview with Mike Parker) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0847817/reference http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0847817/reference
- AlphaGeekZulu 13y agoTo my knowledge the original Helvetica font was created by Max Miedinger (under supervision of his boss Eduard Hoffmann) at the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei in the years 1956 and 1957 under the name "Neue Haas Grotesk". This font was already heavily influenced by Bertholds "Akzidenz Grotesk" (at my time of typesetting-apprenticeship, only professionals would be able to distinguish the two and my master always told me, the Helvetica would have been an effort to copy Akzidenz Grotesk for Linotype without paying license fees to Berthold. He was certainly wrong, but that was his perception). The company D. Stempel AG, co-owner of the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei, produced the "Neue Haas Grotesk" for Linotype machines and re-labeled it into "Helvetica" for marketing purposes. Many years ago I read a fascinating article (I believe from Eric Spiekerman), about the efforts to re-design the forms of the Deutsche Bundespost (German state mail service). In an analysis they found more than 600 variations of Helvetica in use within the organization before the relaunch. The 1983 effort to design the "Neue Helvetica" (by Stempel, for Linotype) was certainly motivated by this defragmentation of Helvetica-variations, and it was sort of a last conservation before DTP would do all its damages to font identity and quality. I am not sure what Mike Parkers role was in this process, but I would assume that he came into play after 1960 and that his role was more in the realization of Helvetica's impact and value for the graphical industry, rather than the original design. Which, in my eyes, sort of disqualifies him for the godfather-title. Nevertheless, I cry for all the big names in the typo-world, as one after another dies these days. I have seen the Helvetica documentary, and I cried tears while watching, because I grew up with Helvetica as a reader and as a professional typesetter (typesetting was a 3-year apprenticeship in Germany around 1980). There is a big cultural thing about Helvetica, that cannot be expressed in words and that is not accessible to digital natives. There is only one true Helvetica face, and it has to be used and typesetted correctly, and in this combination it clearly stands out from everything else. For me, it is the one true font. You cannot fake it. You cannot (and should not) use it for every purpose. And the font has been misused, distorted, copied, derranged, overused and betrayed in every possible way - to the degree that noone can stand it anymore. But try to find some airplane security card from German Lufthansa from the year 1982 and you will understand, how Helvetica can be used to build trust and confidence in airflight passengers! The Helvetica documentary was quite good in giving a vague feeling, what cultural impact can be coded in the history of one single typeface! These days are gone, though, and I feel woe and grief with the decline of cultural typographical awareness and the loss of people like Mike Parker.