M
ax Miedinger was born on December 24, 1910 in Zürich, Switzerland. Max trained as a typesetter from 1926-1930.
Even while training Max attend Kunstgewerbeschule(literally meaning ‘school of arts and crafts’) in Zürich. After completing his studies Max joined Globus department stores as a typographer. Later he joined Haas Type foundry as a door-to-door salesman. Now this may not sound like a desirable job but we have it lucky in this day and age. Back in the 60s when you bought a typeface it was produced in steel pieces and you would have to buy a set of them according to point size and style. Max would go around to different advertising firms and sell these typefaces to them through a catalog system.
In 1957 Helvetica was developed by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei(Haas Type foundry). The idea behind it was Haas wanting to create a new sans-serif typeface that could compete with H. Berthold AG’s Akzidenz-Grotesk typeface on the Swiss Market. This typeface was originally named Neue Haas Grotesk and was based off of Schelter-Grotesk and Haas’ Normal Grotesk. The target of this typeface was to create a neutral but very clean typeface. Linotype aquired Neue Haas Grotesk and reworked their design. In response to the popularity and success of Univers Arthur Ritzel of Stempel redesigned Neue Haas Grotesk into a larger family. If that wasn’t enough Stempel which was Haas’ German parent company changed the name to it’s current title Helvetica in 1960. The name Helvetica was taken from the latin name for Switzerland, Confoederatio Helvetica. The change in name was to help assist the typeface’s marketability on an international market. The original idea was to name it ‘Helvetia’ but Hoffmann deemed it inappropriate to name the typeface after a country.
Eduard Hoffmann
Displayed to the left here is Helvetica in it’s orignal form. Although there are also many variations that add to stroke or legability.
In this comparison chart on the right we have our famed Helvetica up against it’s inspiration AkzidenzGrotesk and it’s competition Univers. As you can visally see Helvetica is the cleanest legable type.
On the left is an comparison of Helvetica with other similar typefaces.
Japanese Oh my what is this you say? Helvetica has been developed to compliment multiple alphabets. Greek
Cyrillic(RUS)
Urdu Hebrew
Helvetica