“Helvetica is like water,” says a recent video about the most popular typeface in the world. The 62-year-old font family, with its sans-serif shapes and clean corners, is ubiquitous. It is used on the signage in New York’s subway system. It is the brand identity of American Airlines, as well as American Apparel. It is on those unfortunate T-shirts that say things like "John & Paul & Ringo & George."

“When something is constructed as well as Helvetica, it should last for a couple of hundred years, just like great architecture,” designer Danny van den Dungen told The New York Times in 2007, when the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective in honor of the typeface.

The new version updates each of Helvetica's 40,000 characters to reflect the demands of the 21st century.

But Charles Nix is not a fan. Nix is the director of Monotype, the world's largest type company, which currently owns the licensing rights to Helvetica. He doesn’t like that the letters scrunch together at small sizes, that the kerning isn’t even across the board. Designers have gotten used to all sorts of magic tricks to make Helvetica look more legible, like changing the size of punctuation marks to balance the letters. “We jokingly refer to it as Helvetica Stockholm Syndrome,” says Nix.

A few years ago, Nix and others at Monotype decided a change was due. The whiff of Helvetica had begun to stink. Major companies, which had used Helvetica for years in branding and other materials, had begun to eschew the typeface. Google stopped using it in 2011, in lieu of a custom font that looks a lot like Helvetica, but better. Apple followed suit in 2013 with its own font. So did IBM. Ditto for Netflix.

Now, Monotype has given Helvetica a face-lift, in the hopes that it can restore some of the magic to the iconic typeface. The new version, Helvetica Now, updates each of Helvetica's 40,000 characters to reflect the demands of the 21st century. It’s designed to be more legible in miniature, like on the tiny screen of an Apple Watch, and hold its own in large-scale applications like gigantic billboards. Nix, who has spent two years reengineering the letters, hopes it will let designers see Helvetica in an entirely new way. To him, it's like looking at “someone you love, when the light hits them the perfect way on a Saturday morning, and you suddenly see them like you’ve never seen them before. It’s like falling in love all over again.”

Helvetica then, Helvetica Now

Before there was Helvetica, there was Neue Haas Grotesk. Created in 1957, the typeface sprung from the mind of Swiss designers Max Miedinger and Edouard Hoffman. Emblematic of Swiss design and midcentury modernism, it was meant to be simple and clean—a set of letters that would disappear to let the words speak for themselves. In 1961, typeface maker Haas rebranded it as Helvetica and introduced to the wider world.

As Helvetica became more popular, Haas began issuing new weights and sizes to meet growing demand. A bold weight here, a hairline version there. But some of those additions to the Helvetica family introduced inconsistencies. Peculiar characters began to emerge. In 1982, the type company Linotype issued a new version of Helvetica, called Neue Helvetica, which sought to to resolve some of those issues and make the typeface available to the blossoming desktop computer market.

“Neue Helvetica was the first digitization of Helvetica,” according to Nix. “That was a long time ago, and so much has happened in our world since then.” For one thing, the type on the internet was not a factor in 1982. Neue Helvetica was made with a single master—one drawing, cut at one size—which lost the nuance of optical sizing. Punctuation looked off-balance next to display-size text. Currencies, like the pound sterling, crumpled in small sizes.