Helvetica: The Font That Took Over the World
Font geeks like me will be fascinated by this interview with New York adjunct professor Paul Shaw, author of the new book “Helvetica and the New York City Subway System,” on the workhorse font of all workhorse fonts.
A lot of people are familiar with the New York City subway system of today. What did the subway look like 50 or 60 years ago?
It wasn’t a unified system of signs. You’ve got ceiling signs, you’ve got institution signs, you’ve got mosaic signs, you’ve got column signs, and then, of course, you’ve got billions of other things: no smoking, no spitting. So, accumulation: That’s what there was in Don Draper’s day.
What happened in the postwar period that inspired reform?
People began to realize that if New York was going to become this world-class city, the heart of finance, art, publishing, you had [to do something about] this embarrassing transportation system. Which, as we all know, is incredibility effective, but not very pleasant. The system is far better today than when I arrived in the late ’70s, and yet there are days when I go down into it and I just start cringing. All of a sudden you just realize it does stink or it’s dirty — even if it’s cleaner than it used to be. It’s an old system, and it’s a cobbled together system, which is really the one thing that separates it from every other system in the world that I know of.
Helvetica was developed in 1957 and was first available in New York in 1963. When did it make its way into the subway system?
It didn’t take over until decades after everybody thought it did. It doesn’t become the official typeface until December 1989. Given that the first attempt is 1966, and the first manual is 1970, that’s a long time, but it crept in. It showed up before it officially “showed up.” You can tell that they still don’t know what they’re doing. Just last December they renamed “Jay Street — Borough Hall” “JayStreet — MetroTech.” I finally went over to see what everything looked like. I was stunned. They’ve got the wrong Helvetica. It’s Helvetica, but it’s not the right one. It’s the same mistake that they made in the ’80s. They got confused. I can’t believe for the entire new station they’ve done that, because they’ve taken great pride in Helvetica as the identity of the system.
