I 

have a favorite font.
It’s not like my favorite movie 
or my favorite food, where I’d 
need some time to think or debate 
between two or three options. It is 
my one, singular favorite font. When 
I watch it appear across the screen, I 
see the work that was put in designing 
and redesigning its curves and edges. 
I see the work I put in, as a designer, 
when I use it. In my years of working 
with it, I’ve learned so many funny 
facts and anecdotes about 
this font that I’ll never 
forget. 
I know it’s free on Mac but 
not on Windows, because 
it loads on my computer, 
but it comes up missing on 
my dad’s. When I helped 
my father design his book, 
we 
stumbled 
across 
this 
challenge. 
I 
know 
the 
spacing between the letters 
is 
uniform 
because 
it’s 
different from many other 
fonts. I know it was invented 
in Switzerland in the 50s, 
but 
my 
favorite 
version 
is a redesign from 1983. I 
know it’s part of the neo-
grotesque style because I 
heard someone say that once, 
though I’m not sure what that 
means. I remember watching 
a 
documentary 
about 
it, 
which was just OK, but 
I’m happy for the director, 
because it got shown at the 
Museum of Modern Art in 
New York City. I know it’s 
the font they use in the New 
York subway system because 
I found a book about it. 
For a font, the extent of 
scholarship on Helvetica is 
astounding. 
Helvetica 
Neue 
— 
Helvetica Neue Bold to be 
exact — makes me feel calm. 
Newsrooms 
and 
design 
projects can be stressful, but 
ultimately Helvetica Neue 
is as dependable as a song I 
know all the words to. Years 
ago, when I first saw it, I fell in love 
with how clean it looked on the page, 
and that was before design was a big 
part of my life. 
Helvetica opened my world to 
modern editorial design. I remember 
when I first saw it in the red and 
white Supreme logo and a couple of 
European magazines. I remember 
how cleansing it felt when my paper 
in high school switched to Helvetica 
Neue from Futura, a slightly older, 
more emotive font. Suddenly, all 

the unnecessary, deco-thickness of 
Futura was streamlined by the perfect 
ratios in Helvetica. It became my 
platonic ideal for what a San Serif font 
should be. 
I judged every other font I came 
across against Helvetica. Recently, 
I’ve even experimented with the light 
version of the font because I like its 
lanky structure. It looks like a baby 
deer standing on two long, skinny 
legs. Helvetica is convenient for me, 

as a designer. It goes well with other 
fonts because it’s so uncomplicated 
and rational, and people like it for the 
same reason. 
I had discovered what everyone 
already knew about Helvetica — it’s 
good. No one hates Helvetica. It’s 
not controversial. It’s a strong font. 
Because there’s really nothing to 
dislike, there are no wacky aspects like 
the faux-handwriting on famously-
memed Comic Sans. It’s a perfect font 
for the minimalist design trend going 

on right now, and because of that, it’s 
basic. 
So, I guess I’m a basic font girl … if 
there is such a thing. I picked one of the 
most mainstream fonts in the world to 
be my font of choice forever. I love the 
same font that North Face, Energizer, 
Post-it and Drake love. It’s similar to 
liking pizza more than all other foods, 
or watching The Notebook every day 
because you really think it’s the best 
movie out there. 

Other designers would understand 
that it’s popular and understand that 
the angles and the thicknesses are 
meticulous. They get that it’s famous 
and can even respect that it looks 
good, but they would be shocked — 
floored — to know that I picked such 
a basic font to be my favorite. 
Every 
day, 
beautiful 
fonts 
are 
designed and put up for sale through 
links in Instagram bios and on 
the Adobe social media platform, 
Behance. A French design house 

that I follow on social media just put 
up a new one called Cako with two 
different versions of R and K that each 
have unique beveling. The different 
versions of each letter are either 
concave or convex, leaving which to 
use up to the designer’s discretion. 
This choice comes along with thick 
serifs and differing line weights on 
different parts of letters. The overall 
effect is gorgeous; it’s a clean but busy 
font that is staunchly modern but not 
lacking in character.
Fonts, especially on social 
media, are an exploding cottage 
industry. An indie font found 
on Instagram with a lot of 
quirks that costs 80 euros to 
download … that’s a cool favorite 
of many millennials. Anyone 
with the Adobe suite and the 
talent can produce a font in 
today’s world. Like many other 
creative endeavors, it’s been 
democratized so anyone with 
an idea can sell work without a 
label. 
People 
put 
in 
serious, 
innovative work designing and 
creating fonts. In fact, I think we 
might be in a font renaissance. 
Fonts skew the meaning of 
letters before they’re even words 
— a single letter can look stoic or 
heartbroken depending on the 
typeface. The process of mapping 
out every angle and every curve 
in each letter of the alphabet, 
punctuation mark and number 
is 
painstaking. 
With 
people 
putting 
themselves 
through 
design hell to make new fonts, I 
feel silly being so obsessed with 
a font that’s over 60 years old. 
Helvetica Neue was designed 
to make me love it. The height 
and width of letters throughout 
the typeface is uniform, and 
each letter has a little pillow 
of space around it. It’s cute 
in its technicality and in its 
uniformity. The way the tail of 
the “g” almost touches the little 
bubble part and the way the dots 
on “i” and “j” hover perfectly 
in line with the rest of the letter are 
soothing to me. It is designed to have 
no message of its own — to be a blank 
canvas for designers to put meaning 
into with placement and sizing and 
to give meaning by organizing it into 
words and phrases. When I look at 
Helvetica Neue, I see years of work 
— my work. I see my editors and 
colleagues, work I’m proud of and 
work that I’m not.
My whole design career is there, in 
this font.

Wednesday, January 16, 2019 // The Statement 
7B
Wednesday, September 25, 2019 // The Statement
7B

BY KATE GLAD, STATEMENT DESIGNER
InDesign: My helvetica neue

ILLUSTRATION BY KATE GLAD