
'Godfather' of Helvetica font, Mike Parker, dies at 84 - 51Cards
http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/27/tech/web/helvetica-typographer-dies/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
======
rayval
I have a fond memory of Mike, with his cheery wicked smile, on a sunny
afternoon riding in an open convertible, charging through traffic-clogged
streets in Boston, heading over to the Bitstream offices, blasting powerful
classical music (unfamiliar to me, who only knew blues and rock) on a crystal-
clear sound system, which reverberated off the office buildings downtown,
while Mike punctuated the music with sharp wit, deftly negotiating near-
collisions at high speed.

For a poignant account of his later years, and his struggle with Alzheimers,
see the blog written by his ex-wife and steady friend, Sybil Masquelier. The
entry "The Farewell Tour" describes their final trip to New York in 2011 to
receive the Type Designers Club lifetime achievement award.

[http://mikeparkerfontgod.blogspot.com/](http://mikeparkerfontgod.blogspot.com/)

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austinhutch
I've started to spend a lot of time on HN and enjoy the community despite not
being a very strong developer. The discussion here though seems to highlight a
divide. This is Helvetica! You can not understate its importance!

If I were to try and translate this for the HN crowd I would compare Helvetica
to whatever you consider to be the greatest framework of all time. We stand on
the shoulders of giants and Mike Parker is one of them.

~~~
nzp
Apart from two (two!) comments, of which one is [dead], expressing confusion
about why this is important, there seems to be no divide. There's really no
need to translate anything to "HN crowd" (by that I assume you really mean
hacker community in general). Competent programmers (hackers) and really
highly technical and highly competent people tend to appreciate good design
(not just graphical design, but design in general) even if they don't know
particularities of it. It's a matter of taste, and good taste is objective (PG
already articulated this better than I could do[1] [2]).

A couple of anecdotes:

\- TeX came to be because Donald Knuth was horribly annoyed with the low
quality of then nascent digital typography in the first edition of The Art of
Computer Programming. AMS Euler[3] typeface is a product of his collaboration
with Hermann Zapf.

\- The first practical application of Unix was to run the typesetting in troff
for technical documentation at Bell Labs.

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/goodart.html](http://paulgraham.com/goodart.html)

[2]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler)

------
51Cards
He was also a founder of Bitstream. Quite the career.

------
candeira
The Evian and Skype logos are definitely not typeset in Helvetica.

~~~
theswan
For a kick:

[http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/](http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/)

~~~
rprospero
As I've said elsewhere in this thread, I simply don't understand typography. I
took the quiz and got 10/20, which I could have gotten from just guessing
randomly.

Was the Helvetica supposed to be more readable than the Arial? Or is Arial
supposed to be a substitute for Helvetica?

~~~
at-fates-hands
Arial wasn't around until 1982.

I think it happened more or less by mistake. The intent wasn't to make it be a
substitute for Helvetica:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial)

The letter shapes of Arial are based on Monotype Grotesque.[5][6] Subtle
changes and variations were made to both the letterforms and the spacing
between characters in order to make it more readable at various resolutions.

The changes cause the typeface to nearly match Linotype Helvetica in both
proportion and weight[7] (see figure), and perfectly match in width.
Nevertheless, there are differences. One columnist observed "Arial was drawn
more rounded than [Helvetica], the curves softer and fuller and the counters
more open. The ends of the strokes on letters such as c, e, g and s, rather
than being cut off on the horizontal, are terminated at the more natural angle
in relation to the stroke direction."

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rlx0x
The impact of Helvetica is quite significant, there even is a documentary
about it, called Helvetica! check it out its really great. (It includes an
interview with Mike Parker)

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0847817/reference](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0847817/reference)

------
AlphaGeekZulu
To my knowledge the original Helvetica font was created by Max Miedinger
(under supervision of his boss Eduard Hoffmann) at the Haas'sche
Schriftgiesserei in the years 1956 and 1957 under the name "Neue Haas
Grotesk". This font was already heavily influenced by Bertholds "Akzidenz
Grotesk" (at my time of typesetting-apprenticeship, only professionals would
be able to distinguish the two and my master always told me, the Helvetica
would have been an effort to copy Akzidenz Grotesk for Linotype without paying
license fees to Berthold. He was certainly wrong, but that was his
perception). The company D. Stempel AG, co-owner of the Haas'sche
Schriftgiesserei, produced the "Neue Haas Grotesk" for Linotype machines and
re-labeled it into "Helvetica" for marketing purposes.

Many years ago I read a fascinating article (I believe from Eric Spiekerman),
about the efforts to re-design the forms of the Deutsche Bundespost (German
state mail service). In an analysis they found more than 600 variations of
Helvetica in use within the organization before the relaunch.

The 1983 effort to design the "Neue Helvetica" (by Stempel, for Linotype) was
certainly motivated by this defragmentation of Helvetica-variations, and it
was sort of a last conservation before DTP would do all its damages to font
identity and quality.

I am not sure what Mike Parkers role was in this process, but I would assume
that he came into play after 1960 and that his role was more in the
realization of Helvetica's impact and value for the graphical industry, rather
than the original design. Which, in my eyes, sort of disqualifies him for the
godfather-title. Nevertheless, I cry for all the big names in the typo-world,
as one after another dies these days.

I have seen the Helvetica documentary, and I cried tears while watching,
because I grew up with Helvetica as a reader and as a professional typesetter
(typesetting was a 3-year apprenticeship in Germany around 1980). There is a
big cultural thing about Helvetica, that cannot be expressed in words and that
is not accessible to digital natives. There is only one true Helvetica face,
and it has to be used and typesetted correctly, and in this combination it
clearly stands out from everything else. For me, it is the one true font. You
cannot fake it. You cannot (and should not) use it for every purpose. And the
font has been misused, distorted, copied, derranged, overused and betrayed in
every possible way - to the degree that noone can stand it anymore.

But try to find some airplane security card from German Lufthansa from the
year 1982 and you will understand, how Helvetica can be used to build trust
and confidence in airflight passengers!

The Helvetica documentary was quite good in giving a vague feeling, what
cultural impact can be coded in the history of one single typeface! These days
are gone, though, and I feel woe and grief with the decline of cultural
typographical awareness and the loss of people like Mike Parker.

~~~
e15ctr0n
I wonder if you've read the book "Just My Type" by Simon Garfield.
[http://www.simongarfield.com/pages/books/just_my_type.htm](http://www.simongarfield.com/pages/books/just_my_type.htm)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_My_Type](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_My_Type)
It's a gem of a book about typography.

In Chapter 9 "What is it about the Swiss?" Garfield writes about Helvetica "On
an emotional plane, it serves several functions. It has geographical baggage,
its Swiss heritage laying a backdrop of impartiality, neutrality and freshness
(it helps at this point if you think of Switzerland as a place of Alps/cow
bells/spring flowers rather than Zurich and its erstwhile heroin problem)."
There is a longer extract from the book here:
[http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665881/how-helvetica-
conquered-...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665881/how-helvetica-conquered-
the-world-with-its-cool-comforting-logic)

A broader article on Swiss graphic design:
[http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/17/lessons-from-
swis...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/17/lessons-from-swiss-style-
graphic-design/)

------
fennecfoxen
> Words printed in Helvetica tell you what stop you're at on the New York
> subway.

Yes, sometimes, but I prefer it when the original signs tell me what sign I'm
at on the New York City Subway:

IRT: [http://instagram.com/p/fBVpruQAcE/](http://instagram.com/p/fBVpruQAcE/)

BMT: [http://instagram.com/p/e0mRuswAY3/](http://instagram.com/p/e0mRuswAY3/)

IND: [http://instagram.com/p/fBV83vQAci/](http://instagram.com/p/fBV83vQAci/)

------
quarterwave
What's really great about Helvetica is that it's idiot-proof on a wide variety
of browsers, and given my limited web-design experience that puts Helvetica in
the "Swiss" category of robust design.

I personally prefer a more evenly kerned quasi-typewriter font like
Inconsolata, but it takes a lot of work to get it looking right on all
browsers.

------
brannon
Edit - that's what I get for reading comments before the article. But the
dictionary is on Netflix, and worth watching.

~~~
neduma
What dictionary is on the Netflix?

~~~
brannon
It seems that I'm too tired to use my phone to type anything correctly. The
documentary "Helvetica" is on Netflix. :)

------
iratedev
I never understood the fascination with Helvetica. It looks nice, sure, but
there has to be more to it than that.

~~~
rkuykendall-com
Watch the documentary. Helvetica is like air, or water. It's the font when you
choose don't want to choose a font, because It says absolutely nothing.

~~~
bluthru
That's an opinion, not fact.

I'd say it's closer to vanilla: So versatile and distinct that it was elevated
to ubiquity. Your average person would have a hard time telling you when
helvetica was created or when vanilla ice cream was created. That's an
achievement.

~~~
ChristianBundy
That's an opinion, not fact.

~~~
bluthru
Never claimed it to be one.

