“That contributed to people looking at it as the neutral typeface. Helvetica is adept at receding and allowing the photography, videography, or illustration to be the focal point. It lets others be champion.”
Jim Ford, Monotype Senior Type Designer, agrees: “It’s sort of a blank typeface. It doesn’t have a lot to grab onto. It’s very plain unless you manipulate or exaggerate it, so it gives power to color and image. You only notice its details if it’s really big, otherwise, it just disappears. It puts the emphasis on other things, and that’s what’s great about it.”
The myth of neutrality
However, no design is completely neutral. Typefaces, like pieces of furniture, logos, or styles of illustration, are subject to context and history as well as our changing opinions of them. As designer Nina Stössinger noted in a Tweet earlier this year, we cannot divorce design from the meaning attached to it, and even so-called neutral typefaces “brim with context and connotation and intent and tone.”
“To us, a ‘neutral typeface’ is not a typeface that is intrinsically neutral, but a typeface that a certain group of people, at a certain moment, choose to perceive as neutral,” Amsterdam design studio Experimental Jetset wrote in 2005. “In short, it’s a typeface that possesses certain expressive characteristics, but for a number of cultural reasons, we as a society choose to ‘filter out’ these when we perceive the typeface.”
And while Helvetica undoubtedly offers a restrained typographic voice, it’s worth noting that the design is more than its reputation.
“When you look at Helvetica, at large sizes especially, there’s a lot of craft in there and a lot of nuances,” points out Matteson. “If you’re setting Helvetica in a design where there’s little imagery or competition with the letterforms, it can become the hero because it has a grace to it.”
