Mondaine

HELVETICA NO 1 LIGHT

Just our type of timepiece

How do you make something excellent using something so ubiquitous as to be mundane? That was the question facing the man devising one of the new Helvetica Light watches from Mondaine. “Look. I buy black socks,” says Erik Spiekermann, the German designer and typographer, who now has a watch face on his things-created list, “because I can’t be bothered to pair-up coloured ones, but I wouldn’t say that black socks are the best in the universe. But they do work every time, and essentially, Helvetica is the black socks of typography.”

The font Helvetica is used everywhere from email programs to multinationals’ letterheads and great designers, like Spiekermann, who has been a world-renowned typographer and creative for over 40 years, tend to avoid it. “When I was approached to do this, I was… meh. A lot of times people use this font because they can’t be bothered to think of another font to use. But that’s the challenge here: to use something I wouldn’t normally use. And to also design a watch face.” Previous challenges: redesigning The Economist magazine, updating the Volkswagen logo and creating the identity and map for the unified Berlin transit system after the wall came down.

“A watch face and a postage stamp are the smallest things you can do [as a designer],” Spiekermann continues, “and I’ve done a postage stamp. The watch face is a great challenge because there’s very little room for manoeuvre — it’s round, there’s a hand, there’s the other hand. In this case, there’s a limited colour palette. How small can you have numbers so that they’re legible? What shapes can you have in place of the numbers?”

Spiekermann’s subtle interpretation of the Helvetica Light is one of several new models for 2017, alongside new colourways, like almost-midnight-blue [pictured] that keep the original design. Spiekermann has also designed a limited edition of the sportier Helvetica Bold watch, based on a Mercedes-Benz speedometer he glimpsed over a cabbie’s shoulder from the back of a Berlin taxi, and two limited runs of the Helvetica Regular watch, one with black strap, case and face. “There are 93 weights of the font,” Spiekermann says, deadpan. “This could keep me busy for a while.”

When Mondaine launched the Helvetica range in 2014, with watches using the font’s Regular, Light and Bold weightings, it was bringing a second Swiss design classic under its umbrella. The first was the Federal Swiss Railways Clock that was reimagined in 1986 as a wristwatch by Erwin Bernheim, who had founded the company 35 years earlier. In the Seventies, Mondaine made its name with a series of world-first LED and LCD digital watches.

The Swiss Railways Watch gave the company a striking and direct link to timekeeping’s past. Now a design classic in its own right, the watch also became something of a rod for the company’s back. When you’re known for doing one thing so well, how do you diversify? Should you even try?

“For at least 25 years, we didn’t do anything else but the Swiss Railways design,” says André Bernheim, son of Erwin, CEO of Mondaine and co-owner of the business with his brother Ronnie. “We thought it was time we put something else alongside this iconic design, and quickly realised that doing so is extremely difficult. So, we formed a group of people outside the watch industry. They were TV presenters, a mayor from St Moritz, industrialists, sociologists, and they were looking for something from the real Switzerland. Not from the cliché, like all our mountains and cows and whatever, but the industrialised Switzerland. Then we remembered Helvetica” [launched as Haas-Grotesk in 1957 by Swiss typographer Max Miedinger but renamed in 1960].

“You don’t need to be a typography nerd to appreciate what we’ve done, but I’m very happy to say that those nerds, and other people involved in design and architecture and that sort of thing, are very happy with Helvetica watches. If we’d have got that wrong, they would have torn us apart,” Bernheim says, “and then no one would have taken us seriously. So, we ended up with something that could not be more Swiss, or more global. The Latin name for Switzerland is ‘Helvetia’ and Helvetica still, today, is one of the most used fonts worldwide, in so many logos of companies.”

Lufthansa, The North Face, Skype, Harley-Davidson, Nestlé and Microsoft all have logos in Helvetica — but not Mondaine. “No,” says Erik Spiekermann. “It uses Futura.” Instead, the company has used Helvetica to make a range of watches so strikingly and simply stylish that you wouldn’t bet against them achieving design-classic status one day soon.

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