In 1960s America, the new discipline of corporate identity consultancy used Helvetica like a high-pressure hose, blasting away the preceding decades of cursive scripts, pictorial logos, excitable exclamation marks and general typographical chaos, and leaving in its place a world of cool, factual understatement. Parker describes it as 'a landslide waiting to go down the mountain'.
Parker is estimated to have popularised over 1,000 of them but Helvetica was the one that took off. The company's Linotype machines were the industry standard in news and book printing, and they supplied the typefaces. The place was the Mergenthaler Linotype Company of the US, where he became director in 1961. Parker, a British-born American, was in the right place at the the right time to smooth its serif-free passage to global dominion. The modern lines of the font are used by airlines such as American and Lufthansa.
