Particularly at a size smaller than 6 points, such as the small display screens of smart watches or smartphones. But the most crucial reason behind their decision to readjust the font that had been heavily used by almost every sector was due to the fact that Helvetica becomes difficult to read when used in smaller spaces. When digitalised, these alternatives were not included, hence the Monotype team’s attempt to bring them back. Even the punctuation had different variations, from sharp to round edges. For instance, the ‘R’ with had a straight leg whereas the ‘a’ was actually the letter ‘d’ with no leg, and the clean ‘U’ was found without any additional projection. They discovered that in the first thirty years, some of the Latin letters of the Helvetica typeface had more than one variable to use.
They looked up and found the design process, the hot lead typesetting technique, as well as the transportation of the type metals to different countries including various ways about how the font had been used. They researched the information and traced back the font’s first version designed by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann back in 1957. Back in 2015, Monotype’s team of font designers at the studio’s Germany office were developing an idea for a new version of Helvetica. Before we dive deeper into the story of Helvetica Now Variable, let’s go back and talk about Helvetica Now.