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He was one cool, cool cat with a great eye for spacing and sizing. Georgia: We all owe it to Mike Parker, man. It's fonts like him that make the rest of us look like jokes.Ĭomic Sans: I've recently found religion. Those other fonts are just mad everyone knows my name.Īrial Black: Didn't Comic Sans date Courtney Love for a little while? Like, right around The People vs Larry Flynt there's pictures of Comic Sans and her leaving La Grenouille looking coked out of their skulls.
#Historic 60s fonts how to
It ain't my fault people don't know how to use me right. We were all on computers for the first time. Helvetica: Did you interview Comic Sans for this?Ĭomic Sans: It was the '90s. I've even heard of some hipsters getting back into the old catalogs. Now anyone with a laptop can access me, or Helvie, or whomever. I owe my life to him.Īrial Black: Bitstream really was a game changer. Did a couple posters for state fairs but before Bitstream, before Parker, man. I was kicking around, playing store signs and random flyers in Seattle and Duluth. Impact: Bitstream really changed the game. Helvetica: Parker had the bright idea right around the time computers were coming up, around the early '80s, to digitize the fonts. I could've been nowhere had Parker not given me that direction. I'm the real deal.Ĭourier New: Parker said that I reminded him of old typewriters and told me to play my strengths. Nobody gave a shit about me until the Jackass logo, anyway. I remember being at a party with Brian Wilson, you know, of the Beach Boys? Too wild.Īrial Black: So Helvie is showing up all over the place. Georgia: That was the golden age of fonts. I'm sure there's some early footage of me in a Playboy mag looking haggard. I started showing up to print with my uppercase E's and P's all over the place. Helvetica: After Parker put me in the Linotype family, that's when the drugs and the women started. Georgia: It made a lot of other fonts jealous. You need a Courier? You want a new one? That's me.
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And that's how that happened.Ĭourier New: Jealous? Not at all. Helvetica: I was being repped by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffman at the time, which was good at the time, put a roof over my head, and then Mike Parker came in and added me to the Linotype family. Mike Parker is to fonts what Brian Epstein was to the Beatles, man. Mike introduced him to linotype, which is now the industry standard. At that time Helvie hadn't even heard of linotype. Said that he loved what he did with his lowercase As, man. Helvie was just doing his thing for a while and then Parker saw him, saw something in him. I think he was called 'Neue Haas Grosse' at the time. Trebuchet: The way I remember hearing it, Helvie. The urban kids and the hipsters loved him, but he didn't make the crossover for a while. It was like the new shit people were getting into from Germany, all those modern fonts, but Helvie - he also kept it traditional.Īrial Black: Helvie was playing these sets at Birdland just kerning, kerning away. He was different but not different enough for the typefaceheads. Georgia: I remember seeing Neue at a club off 43rd. Helvetica: I was playing clubs back then. I'd be nowhere without him.Īrial Black: What nobody tells you is that Helvetica, before Mike got to him anyway, used to be known as Neue Haas Grosse. He saw things in fonts that other people would've missed. It was like working with a real professional. If you haven't, we've cobbled together an oral history of Mike's influence, described by the fonts themselves. Perhaps you've heard of it? It's one of the most popular fonts in the world. He was, as some call him, the grandfather of modern typography, having made (or made famous) many of the fonts that we ignore in favor of Helvetica every day. Mike Parker, 85, died at his home in Portland, Maine.