HelveticaFive seconds ago I was staring at a blank screen. There were 120 square inches (774.2 squarecentimeters, 0.07742 square meters, 2.98920291 × 10

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square miles) of white space staringback at me. If you remember your art classes from grammar school—as you should—youknow that this blank page is a canvas; and if you have a fantastic memory, you know that assoon as I begin to write, or draw, or paint on this page its vast whiteness becomes negativespace. I have now—as you may have surmised—started writing, and Helvetica is cradledbeautifully in that negative space.The story of Helvetica, the subject of Gary Hustwit’s 2007 documentary of the same name,spans over half a century. It is a love story, and like all good love stories, it is full of passion,anger, betrayal, and reunion.When Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann created Helvetica in 1957, graphic design wasdeep in a period of dramatic reconstruction. There was a common belief in the designcommunity that designers had a responsibility to rebuild the world visually as global political,social, and economic reconstruction continued. In Helvetica they found an elegant, simple,legible beacon of modernity. It was, and remains, the most beautiful typeface.In the film, contemporary designers note that there is an “inherent rightness” to Helvetica.Helvetica’s designers seem to have unearthed some fundamental principle of design asprofound as the theory of relativity yet as elementary as addition. There is a certain sureness tothe way the letters sit in the negative space, a solidness not found in any other typeface.Helvetica reassures and comforts us through its simplicity. It is just perfect.Helvetica’s conception launched a revolution in graphic design. Helvetica was itself a designmanifesto. It laid out an unwritten set of rules. The type wanted to be used in a certain way,and designers obliged. Throughout the following decades, Helvetica fast became a banner ofthe modern world. The honeymoon was wonderful. We loved Helvetica, and Helveticareminded us that everything was going to be okay. Though the continued survival of the humanrace was perilously balanced on the Berlin Wall and society was developing far faster thanpeople could adapt, life would continue. And then, the honeymoon ended.There was a group in the design community that hated Helvetica. Helvetica was to them theblood-soaked standard of capitalism, authoritarianism, and the Vietnam War. These designersfound Helvetica’s pervasiveness, its cleanness, and its conventionality disgusting, and theyrebelled violently. One designer looking back noted, “They didn’t know what they stood for,only what they stood against.” The following decades were dominated by typography intendedto communicate not through its legibility, but through its design. At the end of the nineties,typography had been so deconstructed, eviscerated, jumbled, and lobotomized that it couldn’tcommunicate.Throughout the New Millennium, we have witnessed a return to the design sensibilities thatguided Massimo Vignelli, Max Miedinger, and Eduard Hoffman during the fifties and sixties. Wehave rekindled that old flame. We have found our way home.