A typographic project created by Evan Shuster: One minute animation using an interview snippet from the movie "Helvetica" of Mike Parker. Song by T.V. On The Radio: Love Dog.
I discovered this morning on Bing.com. Just click on the blue letters. And, there is Mike's voice, stronger than now, but I remember.
More History of Helvetica
Robert Norton's book, TYPES BEST REMEMBERED; TYPES BEST FORGOTTEN is long out of print-Amazon has used copies listed $40 to $148 a copy- much steeper than the one I paid him one kiss for. I am going to copy Mike's contributions to the two sided book: 'Helvetica' (Best Remembered) and 'Helvetica' (Best Forgotten). Since Robert died I have no idea whom to ask permission to re-publish, but I will find out. After the following essays by Mike, I have more stories about Mike and Robert.
Types Best Remembered: HELVETICA by Mike Parker I've been connected with the production and release of a number of typefaces. One stands out with a satisfying "rightness", not only in the meeting of design, place, and time, but in the warmth and generosity of those involved in the development, characteristics not always to be found in such a competitive industry. I had joined Mergenthaler as Jackson Burke's assistant in June, 1959, a time when development of new Mergenthaler designs was all but impossible. US newspapers were eliminating keying for all but local news by installing drives to operate Linotypes directly from tape. It was punched out on the spot by teletypesetter machines driven by wire service transmission. All news text characters had to be
repeatedly redesigned and remanufactured to fit on rigid TTS brass widths in a series of evolving standards. A new font was required for each size of each face for each column width at each change of the standard. The drawing office and the matrix factory were tied up for twenty years preparing many hundreds of TTS versions of the new text designs for the industry that paid the freight.
Jackson had guarded one small corner of capacity and used it to produce our one large series for trade typesetters. Trade Gothic is a sans serif in four widths, three weights, and ten sizes, a refined and expanded linecaster version of Morris Fenton Benton's great 1908/9 series Lightline and News Gothic. Jackson and the company saw it as an 'American' answer to the 'European' sans serifs, headed by Univers.
I worried. The European faces clearly grew out of a 20th century preoccupation with the power of figure/ground relationships, starting at the Bauhaus, developing as the central design canon in Switzerland. A student of Josef Albers and Armin Hoffman, I saw that conscious design of sans serif white shapes to contain and guide the blacks gave these new designs a firmness, a lock in rightness, a power
lacking in any of the older designs, American or European. Tastemakers were adopting Swiss design; an international movement was gaining momentum.
The large Univers series was the market favorite, but inspection revealed difficulties for our equipment. The uniformly steep slope of italics promised duplexing disasters (later to be born out in the Matrotype series). Univers achieved uniform design across the series by applying all design limitations required by peripheral widths and weights to the core, restraining design of the central versions. Linotype mechanical limitations forbade uniformity; in our markets peripheral designs were little used. At Mergenthaler the central core demanded aand received special attention.
I searched for a sans serif design of Swiss character that would meet our specifics for a broad series. It should provide the basis for a central core of strongest possible design. Italics must be moderately sloped, with slope to vary as required by the fitting problems in each width and weight. Design features must vary as necessary in peripheral versions. i quietly looked at a number of designs for inspiration, particularly Airport, newly designed for Heathrow by Matthew Carter.
I discovered that Edouardo Hoffmanat the Haas type foundry, a distant subsidiary, had produced a magnificent design with the required characteristics, the Haas Grotesk. It lacked only adaption to the Linotype, and perhaps a new name. Walter Kunz at Stempel, our principal European foundry, was interested in producing a Linotype series, and commissioned the design from Haas. After due consideration, he telephoned Hoffman and told him that Stempel and Linotype had decided to call the resulting series Helvetica. "You can't do that' said Hoffman in horror, 'that is the name of the country."Five weeks later he returned the call, quietly asking permission to use the new name in Switzerland.
A little later, Jackson Burke called me into the big office to tell me he had decided to retire within the year, and that I was in line for the job. He told me the Trade Gothic was being finished. To my astonishment, he asked if there was any new design that I felt was important enough for the Linotype to be worth an early start, before his retirement. Aware of the generosity of his offer, concerned about the conflict between the designs, I paused...and brought up Helvetica, with my reasons for thinking it critical. Jackson, champion of Trade Gothic, was silent.
Several weeks later he stopped me in the corridor, and told me the German drawings for the Helvetica series were on their way from Frankfort. So began the first Mergenthaler face to be cut in the US directly from European drawings that had been made to European standards, in many small respects different from ours. The series was prepared with no design change, successfully adapting Didot sizes to US alignment, the first step toward a common standard to be shared by the loose confederation of the Linotype companies, the foundation of the tenfold expansion of the library that was to follow.
Types Best Forgotten HELVETICA By Mike Parker
Helvetica was the typeface of the Swiss movement begun at Basel Kunstgewerbeschule in the fifties. Slowly it seeped out through multinational corporate identity (Knoll comes to mind) to become the face of bland corporate stolidity (Bank of America). With the advent of the personal computer, instead of being gracefully retired, Helvetica spread further like Velveeta cheese, and its fifties look became ubiquitous in the sixties, seventies and eighties. When the
US government enacted legislation to create generic packaging of essential items, the labeling face was also generic: Helvetica. Based on the nineteenth century grotesques, the main problem with Helvetica is the fact that discrete shapes of the individual letters obstruct legibility. The letters are square and squat, and don't communicate with their neighbours. There is no airflow in words, and no cohesion of ideational units. As it is generally set, there is more internal space in the counters than around the words, creating ugly and standoffish silhouettes.
Velveetica is difficult to distinguish from many other types, such as Univers. (Though people say, 'Of course they're different. Just look at the number 2!' or some such.) Adrian Frutiger, creator of Univers, revisited the sans serif for his signage of Orly airport in Paris. The new improved Frutiger sans is not a grot but a humanist-derived version, more like a Gill Sans or Syntax, eminently more readable because of the variety in letter shapes, the openness of the characters, the improved letterfit and hence, the better aerodynamic shape of the words. Velveetica wasn't a good type to begin with. There are many worse text types, but Helvetica's very pervasiveness is a big stroke against it. It's not invisible, just boring.
Helvetica was the typeface of the Swiss movement begun at Basel Kunstgewerbeschule in the fifties. Slowly it seeped out through multinational corporate identity (Knoll comes to mind) to become the face of bland corporate stolidity (Bank of America). With the advent of the personal computer, instead of being gracefully retired, Helvetica spread further like Velveeta cheese, and its fifties look became ubiquitous in the sixties, seventies and eighties. When the
US government enacted legislation to create generic packaging of essential items, the labeling face was also generic: Helvetica. Based on the nineteenth century grotesques, the main problem with Helvetica is the fact that discrete shapes of the individual letters obstruct legibility. The letters are square and squat, and don't communicate with their neighbours. There is no airflow in words, and no cohesion of ideational units. As it is generally set, there is more internal space in the counters than around the words, creating ugly and standoffish silhouettes.
Velveetica is difficult to distinguish from many other types, such as Univers. (Though people say, 'Of course they're different. Just look at the number 2!' or some such.) Adrian Frutiger, creator of Univers, revisited the sans serif for his signage of Orly airport in Paris. The new improved Frutiger sans is not a grot but a humanist-derived version, more like a Gill Sans or Syntax, eminently more readable because of the variety in letter shapes, the openness of the characters, the improved letterfit and hence, the better aerodynamic shape of the words. Velveetica wasn't a good type to begin with. There are many worse text types, but Helvetica's very pervasiveness is a big stroke against it. It's not invisible, just boring.
I do not know who wrote Robert's obituary but he or she obviously knew the dear man well. From The Independent: Robert George Norton, typographer and inventor: born London 24 May 1929; married 1960 Abigail Scully (one son, three daughters); died West Huntspill, Somerset 8 March 2001. Robert Norton was, in every sense, larger than life. His huge frame - he stood six and a half feet high and broad to match - he inherited from his father, along with a passion for mucking about in boats. From his mother, author of The Borrowers, came short sight and the gift of seeing the small and inconspicuous as it truly was, not as it seems to us. Infinitely careful in the details of work, he was reckless of life and limb, and money. He was frequently broke, but his generosity was princely. Strong, he was also tender. Ruthlessly impatient of delay, he could idle away a sunny afternoon, the best of good company. Like Cavafy, he stood at a slight angle to the universe, but the shadow that he cast was immense. Letterforms were to be his passion and livelihood, but it is hard to trace this in heredity. His father, also Robert Norton, came of a family that settled in Portugal, and grew rich, only to lose all in the Depression. Mary Pearson was an actress at Lilian Baylis's Old Vic when she married in 1926. The family grew up in relative poverty, until the Second World War divided them. The children went with Mary to America, returning in 1943. Robert went to Christ's Hospital with a scholarship. He was good enough at mathematics to have made an academic career. Instead, he left school at 16, and found odd jobs until 1955, when he joined Rupert Hart-Davis, the publishers, where he turned his hand to almost anything (except, he said, what he was asked to do). But he discovered his métier, typography. In 1956 he got the chance to sail to America, crewing a yacht by the northern route which established a record for its class. In New York he lived by his wits until he got a job at the United Nations, the only place he could work without a work permit. Then he was offered a job at Cambridge University Press, New York. To take this he had to leave the United States to apply for a green card, so again he sailed a friend's boat to Jamaica. There he met Lewis Davidson, a charismatic Scottish Presbyterian minister who had founded Knox College, a school in the mountains. He taught photography there before returning. In New York he met Gail Scully, whom he married in December 1960 in Boston; that his best man was a Jamaican created a sensation. Almost immediately he had to go back to Jamaica to help at Knox College while Lewis Davidson recovered from a heart attack. In Jamaica over the next three years, he built the best bookshop on the island and started a factory, teaching children to print exercise books, which were sold all over the West Indies. Overworked, he was seriously ill for several months. When he recovered, he returned to England on a banana boat with his wife and two children. He bought a large house at Monks Risborough, in Buckinghamshire, and with Tim Wood set up Photoscript, combining photosetting with an instant print service. In the process he taught himself to make fonts, doing the photography and making up film-strips himself. In 1970, he and Wood divided the business amicably. Next year he was run over; a lesser man would have been killed, but he survived. He made photo-matrix fonts for Bobst, and found a most unlikely partner in Allan Friedman of Alphatype, maker of the first multi-font filmsetter. He produced Else, a type named after a sunken Baltic ketch, which he raised. But his restless mind looked beyond, to the as yet untried field of digital technology. Laser printers had just been invented and their manufacturers were looking for digital fonts, bitmaps for basic printers, outline for the more advanced. The few suppliers were all working for big digital typesetters. Norton saw the gap: desktop laser printers. There were no tools to produce fonts for them, and he travelled the world to find them. He found what he needed in hardware and software developed theoretically at Zurich. He risked all on this commercially untried process, setting up Digital Type Systems, and he brought it off. For this he needed a more central base and found it in a warehouse in as yet undeveloped Wapping, east London. A whole floor overlooked the Thames. He installed a telescope so you could see the shipping close-up, and there was a wine cash-and-carry next door. He installed an Apple laser-printer on which he could draw and correct simultaneously. Designers and students came; it was more like an informal college than a business. But the big firms came too for fonts, and he supplied them, all over the world. He made Hebrew fonts for Israeli printers, Tibetan for Tibetan temples, and even the first ever full Kanji font. It all lasted until the sophistication of hinted outlines replaced outline and bitmap fonts. By then he had been squeezed out of Wapping by property developers, and found a new lair in the old Cooper's marmalade factory in Oxford, but finally he was drawn, protesting, to visit the enemy, Microsoft, at Seattle. Steve Shaiman, the head of typography there, saw at once that he had an eye and critical sense of unique value. He threw a first fly by asking him to review the hinting of the core TrueType fonts for Windows. Norton was hooked and stayed to become the cornerstone of Microsoft's type programs.If he was held in golden handcuffs, his integrity stayed unchanged as he strove to preserve the individuality of letter-designs within the Microsoft straitjacket. He also kept an ancient boat that he sailed up and down the matchless waters round Seattle.Released in 1997, he returned to England, and finally to Huntspill Court in Somerset, where he embarked on his last great enterprise, editing, designing and printing by the hundred thousand elegant little books the size of diaries. The Parsimony Press books are anthologies, classics, all sorts, the products of his vast reading (yet you never saw him read anything but a newspaper or thriller), that now await the equally vast readership his far-sighted mind saw for them.A lifetime spent in testing his great frame to destruction has now ended. Robert Norton's body, too big to be cremated, rests in Huntspill churchyard. Larger than life alive, to all who knew him he remains larger than death.
I have personal stories of Robert: (To be continued)
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