Book: Helvetica Forever

Lars Müller is fascinated by the sans serif font. Following the highly successful Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface, published in 2005, the eponymous typeface has found even more fame with a documentary, demonstrating that there's a design-hungry audience out there, eager for the low-down on what many people simply take for granted.

see more pages from inside Helvetica Forever

Helvetica Forever: Story of a Typeface, also published by Müller, together with Victor Malsy, is the book for them. Beautifully designed, as one would expect, the book attempts to tackle the great paradox at the heart of Helvetica - how could a typeface designed for modest, almost invisible ubiquity, become such a well-known, almost iconic 'brand'.

Originally named 'New Haas Grotesk,' Eduard Hoffman's typeface became Helvetica, a name that was felt to help its international appeal. The Haas foundry never looked back, and the typeface became one of the foundation stones of 1960s design before becoming fully integrated into the digital era. Complete with reproductions of Hoffman's original design journals, this is the perfect book for design obsessives.

25 February 2009 | Art