Style gets a bad rap. Style is frivolous, unnecessary, a distraction. It's the freeloading slacker in the "style over substance" cliché, as if the two are mutually exclusive.
Sometimes that reputation is deserved. Style superseding substance spawned Victorian corsets, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and diamond-studded Rolexes.
But when it's done right, style and functionality intertwine to a degree that elevates how we live our lives. Note the iPod, the Honda Civic, the bottle opener.
Style isn't about HGTV divas or designer fashions. It's about people like Max Miedinger, a rather portly Swiss man who turned the world upside down in 1957 -- with a new typeface.
Miedinger made his living designing fonts. He spent most of his day sketching out letters -- the a's, the u's, the tricky R's -- engraving them on plates and trying to convince his bosses that they were better than every other typeface out there.
It was a different world back then. Typefaces were produced by large established foundries, and Miedinger's, the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei, was one of the oldest.
Look at newspapers of the era and you'll see what was popular: thin strokes and stout serifs, grandfatherly type that had all the charisma and youth of a bank manager's letterhead. Looser, more creative fonts were saved for nightclub signs and spoken-word poetry flyers.
Miedinger would never be mistaken for a beatnik. But he wanted to create something that was different, smoother and sleeker with better lines and less wasted space.
After a year of development, he took drastic measures that few at the time could stomach: He thickened the letters and lopped off the frou-frou serifs. His creation was bold but compact.
He called it Die Neue Haas Grotesk. We call it Helvetica.
Looking back, Helvetica is largely responsible for how we view type today. Without Helvetica, there would be no 1960s art posters, no Star Wars logo, no IRS tax forms. Helvetica is used in the logos for American Apparel, IBM, Jeep and AT&T. It's the typeface for every single sign in New York City's subway system. Microsoft was so jealous of Helvetica that it created a copy, Arial.
Helvetica wasn't popular just because it was new. It was a breakout success because it held substance and style to the same high standard, streamlining something that was ornamental into something that is beautiful.
There are changes coming to the news industry, and there are changes coming to your Collegian. Papers are getting smaller, words shrinking, columns cut and resized and cut again. You see it all over the country.
We're changing. But it's our job to make sure those changes elevate what you're reading.
We need to do it with style.
