One of these attempts, to get in on the Helvetica madness, was by Monotype adapting its sans serif ‘grotesque’ family to its competitors exact specifications with minor tweaks: by producing a typeface design called Arial. It’s quite possible that most of the “Helvetica” seen in the ’70s was actually not Helvetica.” Every typesetting manufacturer had its own Helvetica look-alike. Instead you got Triumvirate, or Helios, or Megaron, or Newton, or whatever. If you opted to purchase Compugraphic, AM, or Alphatype typesetting equipment, you couldn’t get Helvetica. So, if you wanted to buy a typesetting machine and wanted the real Helvetica, you had to buy Linotype.

while typeface names can be protected legally, typeface designs themselves are difficult to protect. For better or worse, in many countries - particularly the U.S. “Many type manufacturers in the past have done knock-offs of Helvetica that were indistinguishable or nearly so. This naturally lead to Linotype’s competitors attempting to muscle into the market through clones. Stempel AG and Linotype re-designed and digitised Neue Helvetica and updated it into a cohesive font family, so that it could be used for the revolutionary new computer typesetting machines. It was the default font of choice for graphic designers and it encapsulates the ethos of the age (it is still used widely in the art and fashion industries).

Helvetica is one of the most influential typefaces of this century (more on that when this series gets to H for Helvetica). In his opinion, Arial is “little more than a shameless impostor”, a cheap-low rent fake designed to mimic Helvetica. Simonson argues that Arial’s ubiquitousness is not due to its aesthetic quality but a reflection on the all-pervasive influence of Microsoft. The typographer Mark Simonson recounts the evolution of the typeface in a wonderful entry in his online journal titled “ The Scourge of Arial”.

Sonoran sans serif font