![]() While Helvetica was not simply a reworking of Akzidenz-Grotesk, ⁵ its initial development as Neue Haas-Grotesk in Switzerland reflected, in part, the popularity that Akzidenz-Grotesk had begun to enjoy in Western European graphic design during the immediate postwar years. No earlier typeface had ever experienced that kind of hold on the market, at least not in Germany. Helvetica’s popularity eventually became so widespread that - as Gary Hustwit presented in his 2007 documentary film Helvetica - its use represented a cultural milestone. ³ Typographically, it took a long time to get to something like the ubiquity that Helvetica ⁴ enjoyed among Western European and North American graphic designers in the 1960s. ![]() ![]() Those designers were just as likely to specify new geometric-style sans serifs like Futura ² as they were older typefaces, like Schelter & Giesecke’s late-nineteenth-century Breite magere Grotesk. Still outré for whole books, German typographers were by then finally beginning to regularly consider sans serifs for long texts, or publications intended for immersive reading. When Jan Tschichold’s Die neue Typographie appeared 28 years later, it was also composed entirely with sans serifs. This was the Feste des Lebens und der Kunst: eine Betrachtung des Theaters als höchsten Kultursymbols, ¹ written and designed by Peter Behrens. The first book composed entirely in upper- and lowercase sans serif types was only published in 1900.
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