Helvetica is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. It also known by its original name Neue Haas Grotesk and was renamed Helvetica in 1960, which in Latin means ”Swiss”, from Helvetia, capitalising on Switzerland’s reputation as a centre of ultra-modern graphic design.

Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the famous 19th-century (1890s) typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk and other German and Swiss designs. Its use became a hallmark of the International Typographic Style that emerged from the work of Swiss designers in the 1950s and 1960s, becoming one of the most popular typefaces of the mid-20th century. Notable features of Helvetica as originally designed include a high x-height, the termination of strokes on horizontal or vertical lines and an unusually tight spacing between letters, which combine to give it a dense, solid appearance.

Franklin Gothic and its related faces are a large family of sans-serif typefaces in the industrial or grotesque style developed in the early years of the 20th century by the type foundry American Type Founders (ATF) and credited to its head designer Morris Fuller Benton. ”Gothic” was a contemporary term (now little-used except to describe period designs) meaning sans-serif.

Franklin Gothic has been used in many advertisements and headlines in newspapers. The typeface continues to maintain a high profile, appearing in a variety of media from books to billboards. Despite a period of eclipse in the 1930s, after the introduction of European faces like Kabel and Futura, they were re-discovered by American designers in the 1940s and have remained popular ever since. Benton’s Franklin Gothic family is a set of solid designs, particularly suitable for display and trade use such as headlines rather than for extended text. Many versions and adaptations have been made since.

Times New Roman is a serif typeface. It was commissioned by the British newspaper The Times in 1931 and conceived by Stanley Morison. As a typeface designed for newspaper printing, Times New Roman has a high x-height, short descenders to allow tight linespacing and a relatively condensed appearance. It has become one of the most popular typefaces of all time and is installed on most personal computers.

Asked to advise on a redesign, Morison recommended that The Times change their text typeface from a spindly nineteenth-century face to a more robust, solid design, returning to traditions of printing from the eighteenth century and before. The new design made its debut in The Times on 3 October 1932.

In Times New Roman’s name, Roman is a reference to the regular or roman style (sometimes also called Antiqua). Roman type has roots in Italian printing of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, but Times New Roman’s design has no connection to Rome or to the Romans.

Futura is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Paul Renner and released in 1927. It was developed as a contribution to the New Frankfurt project, a radical affordable housing project in Frankfurt, Germany that many renowned modernist architects at the time were involved in. Described as “the typeface of our time” and “a face representing the new typography of the European avant-garde”, Futura was released to stand out against the elaborate, handwritten-style typefaces that were popular at the time in order to promote simplicity, modernism and industrialization.

Futura has an appearance of efficiency and forwardness. Although Renner was not associated with the Bauhaus, he shared many of its idioms and believed that a modern typeface should express modern models, rather than be a revival of a previous design. Renner’s design rejected the approach of most previous sans-serif designs (now often called grotesques), which were based on the models of signpainting, condensed lettering and nineteenth-century serif typefaces, in favour of simple geometric forms: near-perfect circles, triangles and squares. It is based on strokes of near-even weight, which are low in contrast. The lowercase has tall ascenders, which rise above the cap line, and uses nearly-circular, single-storey forms for the ”a” and ”g”, the former previously more common in handwriting than in printed text. The uppercase characters present proportions similar to those of classical Roman capitals.