It’s nearly quarter past seven.

FOR more than three-quarters of an hour one chill evening last November, my son and I patiently wound our way through the crash barrier queues down Claypath to get in to Durham’s Lumiere festival. We could see our lives ticking away on the Helvetictoc projected onto the side of Millennium Place.

With time to kill, I admired the Helvetictoc’s beautiful curves, its simple roundedness, its even strokes, its perfect clarity.

It’s almost half past seven.

On Wednesday, the Helvetictoc was installed as a permanent timepiece in Durham.

Our Victorian forefathers placed large dials with moving hands in towers and steeples when they wanted a new town clock; we project a phrase, reminiscent of the days when you stopped someone in the street and asked them the time, onto a building.

It’s right after ten to eight.

As well as telling the time, Helvetictoc is a homage to the typeface Helvetica. Until about ten years ago, typefaces only interested strange people like printers and journalists, but today, everyone has an opinion. Open an email, click on the dropdown fonts menu, and a list as long as your arm will appear of different ways of writing. Which one is right for you?

The Northern Echo

Your chosen typeface becomes your brand.

The Northern Echo’s titlepiece is in a typeface called Clarendon. It was created by a Robert Besley at the Fann Street Foundry in London in the late 1830s, and is one of the first typefaces of the newspaper age: bold, punchy, and easy to read (so punchy that German First World War proclamations were printed in it; so easy to read that US Wild West Wanted posters used it).

The first ever typeface was created by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th Century when he invented the first printing press.

He chose Germanic Gothic black letters, but as the technology spread, each nation developed its own style of letters.

In about 1500, Italian printers perfected an artistic typeface that slanted like handwriting and so italics was born.

Around 1540 in Paris, Claude Garamond invented a dainty typeface that suited the French character – it is one of many typefaces in your dropdown menu that bear the name of their designer.

After the Second World War, the Haas Type Foundry in Münchstein, Switzerland, needed a new “grotesk” typeface – a sans serif face, without the twiddly bits at the end of each letter. This new face had to be neutral, simple, sleek with no hidden meaning and no fancy fiddly bits.

In June 1957, designer Max Miedinger and company president Eduard Hoffman launched Neue Haas Grotesk. It was the perfect typeface, but the name wasn’t quite right. They wondered about calling it Helvetia, after the Latin name for Switzerland, but a sewing machine company had beaten them to it. So, in 1960, they called it Helvetica, meaning Swiss, and the world’s most popular typeface was born.

Because of its sans serif appearance, it has proven perfect for low resolution computer screens, and so now it is everywhere, from signs to forms to books to Google to Twitter to an artistic installation in Durham City.

It’s precisely eight o’clock.

I wonder if Helvetictoc will stand the test of time as well as Victorian turret clocks.