Rambling about Helvetica

Happy are those who can post in Helvetica!  

Helvetica is a font, as you may or may not already know, that is extremely popular and VERY well designed. 

Helvetica was designed in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Switzerland, as a replacement for fonts used in signage.

The designers of the font wanted it to be very easy to read and have no particular "character" to it so that it's uses could be varied without lending a certain "tone" or "feeling" to the text.

Helvetica's use is so widespread that it is quite astonishing.  A massive number of corporations use the font in their logos. For example;

Apple,

3M, 

American Airlines, 

American Apparel, 

BMW, 

Jeep,

JC penny, 

Lufthansa, 

Microsoft, 

Target, 

Re/Max, 

Toyota, 

Panasonic, 

Motorola, 

Kawasaki and Verizon Wireless all use the font. 

Even the movie ratings you see on the back of DVD's is set in Helvetica.

NASA used helvetica on the space shuttle Orbiter. The US and the Canadian Government also use helvetica. 

In fact, helvetica's use is so extremely widespread that there was a documentary made about it. (Which, by the way, is excellent.) 

Most road signs you will see are set in either helvetica, or a typeface based on helvetica.

And now I can type all my posts in it.

Life is good.

-Josh, who is extremely happy that helvetica has joined the Blogger universe.