Helvetica

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elvetica was developed in 1957 by Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann at the Haassche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) of Mnchenstein, Switzerland. Haas set out to design a new sans-serif typeface that could compete with the successful Akzidenz-Grotesk in the Swiss market. Originally called Neue Haas Grotesk, its design was based on Schelter-Grotesk and Haas Normal Grotesk. The aim of the new design was to create a neutral typeface that had great clarity, no intrinsic meaning in its form, and could be used on a wide variety of signage. When Linotype adopted Neue Haas Grotesk (which was never planned to be a full range of mechanical and hot-metal typefaces) its design was reworked. After the success of Univers, Arthur Ritzel of Stempel redesigned Neue Haas Grotesk into a larger family. In 1960, the typefaces name was changed by Haas German parent company Stempel to Helvetica (derived from Confoederatio Helvetica, the Latin name for Switzerland) in order to make it more marketable internationally. It was initially suggested that the type be called Helvetia which is the original Latin name for Switzerland. This was ignored by Eduard Hoffmann as he decided it wouldnt be appropriate to name a type after a country. He then decided on Helvetica as this meant Swiss as opposed to Switzerland. 2 TYPOGRAPHY MARCH 2011

Bonnie Thompson

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Language Variants
The Cyrillic version was designed in-house in the 1970s at D. Stempel AG, then critiqued and redesigned in 1992 under the advice of Jovica Veljovic. Matthew Carter designed the Helvetica Greek.

Fonts

Helvetica Light was designed by Stempels artistic director Erich Schultz-Anker, in conjunction with Arthur Ritzel. Designed by Matthew Carter, Helvetica Compressed are narrow variants that are tighter than the Helvetica Condensed. It shares some design elements with Helvetica Inserat, but using curved tail in Q, downward pointing branch in r, and tilde bottom . The family consists of Helvetica Compressed, Helvetica Extra Compressed, Helvetica Ultra Compressed fonts. Helvetica Textbook is an alternate design of the typeface. Some characters such as 1, 4, 6, 9, I, J, a, f, j, q, u, , and are drawn differently from the original version. Helvetica Rounded is a version containing rounded stroke terminators. Only bold, bold oblique, black, black oblique, bold condensed, bold outline fonts were made, with outline font not issued in digital form by Linotype. Helvetica Narrow is a version where its width is between

Helvetica Compressed and Helvetica Condensed. However, the width is scaled in a way that is optically consistent with the widest width fonts. The font was developed when printer ROM space was very scarce, so it was created by mathematically squashing Helvetica by 18% (to 82% of the original width), resulting in distorted letterforms and thin vertical strokes next to thicker horizontals.

manager was Wolfgang Schimpf, and his assistant was Reinhard Haus; the manager of the project was Ren Kerfante. Erik Spiekermann was the design consultant and designed the literature for the launch in 1983. Other changes include improved legibility, heavier punctuation marks, and increased spacing in the numbers.

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Neue Helvetica is a reworking of the typeface with a more structurally unified set of heights and widths. It was developed at D. Stempel AG, Linotypes daughter company. The studio

Helvetica is among the most widely used sans-serif typefaces. Versions exist for the following alphabets/ scripts: Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Greek,

usage

Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Urdu, Khmer and Vietnamese. Helvetica is a popular choice for commercial wordmarks, including those for 3M, American Airlines, American Apparel, BMW, Jeep, JCPenney, Lufthansa, Microsoft, Mitsubishi Electric, Orange, Target, Toyota, Panasonic, Motorola, Kawasaki and Verizon Wireless. Apple Inc. has used Helvetica widely in Mac OS X (as default font for sansserif/Swiss generic font family), iOS (previously iPhone OS), and the iPod. The iPhone 4 uses Neue Helvetica. Helvetica is widely used by the U.S. government; for example, federal income tax forms are set in Helvetica, and NASA uses the type on the Space Shuttle orbiter. Helvetica is also used in the United States television rating system.

MARCH 2011 HELVETICA 3