My kind of history

How Helvetica Took Over the Subway

City Room took a day-long tour with Paul Shaw, a New York historian who has an encyclopedic knowledge of signs in the city and in the subway system. He is known to scold people for confusing the terms “typeface,” “lettering,” and “font.” (Font, the word most familiar in an age of software drop-down menus, traditionally had a more narrow definition than “typeface,” but is now conflated with older term.)

Only a typeface aficionado like Mr. Shaw can point out remnants of Helvetica’s predecessor — Standard (also known as Akzidenz Grotesk) — scattered around the underground labyrinth. Mr. Shaw says the subway design team had originally chosen Standard, as the universal typeface in 1966, not Helvetica. A manual of that time declared that, “Of the various weights of sans serif available, Standard Medium has been found to offer the easiest legibility from any angle, whether the passenger is standing, walking or riding” (Sign legibility when your audience is in motion continues to be a vexing problem).

Helvetica was originally created in Switzerland (the name is derived from the Latin word for Swiss). It was a neutral typeface from a neutral country and gained runaway popularity starting in the 1960s for its modern grace. But the subway system looked elsewhere.

“It was an incredibly courageous thing to do at a time when Helvetica was riding high,” Mr. Shaw said.

Seriously, i could spend the whole day following the links from this article to various discussions of how serifs mutated over time, and why subway mosaic tiles look the way they do.