Hellvetica Puts a Spooky Twist on the World’s Most Popular Font

Zack Roif was having a perfectly normal day at work last Friday when he opened an email invitation to the office Halloween party. The theme: Hellvetica, the world’s most ubiquitous font turned evil. Roif, who is an associate creative director at RGA, an ad agency in New York, appreciated the humor. Then he wondered if he could turn the nightmare into a reality. “I thought, This kind of small joke deserves to be a larger joke.”

Inspired, Roif started Slacking with his colleague Matthew Woodward, also an associate creative director. Together, they got to work on creating what Roif calls “an absolute monster of a typeface.” Now you can download Hellvetica, a typeface for sending your designs straight to Hades.

The visual assault of Hellvetica is both obvious and subtle. The words look right, until they don’t. Letters run into one another as if pressed together in a crowded subway car. Staring at a sentence in Hellvetica is dizzying and disorienting, as if trying to read while drunk.

Kern in hell: Hellvetica’s letter spacing is intentionally off. Courtesy of RGA

“Sweet Jesus, this is unsettling,” someone wrote on Twitter. Another called it “a short-form horror story for graphic designers.”

Like any good scary story, Hellvetica takes something familiar and innocuous and turns it into something to fear. Helvetica—as in, the original font—is among the most popular typefaces in the world. It has been found everywhere from the signage on the New York City Subway, to the branding for American Airlines and American Apparel, to the text on income tax forms. Until 2015, it was the default font across the iPhone operating system. NASA uses it extensively, both in space and on earth.

So when Helvetica gets distorted, it’s unsettling. Last year, developer Tim Holman used this concept to create Smelvetica, a Helvetica-inspired font “for your worst enemies.” The spaces between the letters, or kerning, was “specially altered, to be, well, bad, terrible, awful and painful,” Holman wrote on Github. (Smelvetica later received a takedown notice from Monotype, the company that owns the licensing rights to Helvetica. Monotype did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Hellvetica.)

Similar to Smelvetica, Woodward says he only made one adjustment to the original font: the kerning. “It’s crazy how really small adjustments to each kerning of each character really screws up visually how nice it once was,” he says. “You look at it and you’re like, ‘My font is broken.’”

Matthew Woodward says some coders have changed their system fonts to be Hellvetica.Courtesy of RGA

That is, of course, the trick. Everything that once was normal now looks terrible. Since Roif and Woodward made Hellvetica available, they say it’s been downloaded “in the thousands.” Someone made a Chrome extension that automatically converts Helvetica to Hellvetica.

“We saw a couple people screwing with their bosses at work by changing their system font from Helvetica to Hellvetica,” Roif says. “And there are coders changing their system fonts to be Hellvetica,” adds Woodward.

As for the threat of Monotype squashing it? “We’re not concerned about getting taken down,” says Roif. “I’m sure if they take us out, it would only be fair that Helvetica sent Hellvetica back to Hell.”

Fortunately, it seems like Monotype is a fan. After this story was published, WIRED heard back from the company. “I love Hellvetica! Any new way to look at Helvetica is great to me,” Charles Nix, Monotype’s type director, said. “Does the spacing bother me? Does it scare me? The 21-year-old me is terrified! The whatever-age-I-am-now me finds it charming.”

Updated 10-29-2019, 6 pm ET: This story has been updated to include a comment from Monotype.

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