History of the typeface

In the late 19th century, designers begin to use big, bold type without serifs for display type. These faces are called “Grotesques” and have very little difference in stroke weight—none to the casual observer.

One of these grotesque fonts is Akzidenz Grotesk, designed by the German Berthold Type foundry in the late 1800s. The typeface was one of the first with lowercase letters, and was more delicate and readable than the huge, bold san serifs used in poster designs up to that time. It also came in four different weights.

The early 20th century saw the birth of geometric fonts—sans serif fonts whose perfectly round curves and square letters reflected the industrial revolution. Unfortunately, these geometric fonts were painful to read in text type.

In 1956, Edouard Hoffmann, of the Haas Type Foundry in Switzerland, decided that the more natural typeface, Akzidenz Grotesk, needed to be reworked for a new century. Under the guidance of Hoffmann, Max Miedinger drew the new typeface and in 1956 it was released as Neue Haas Grotesk. It came in any weight and style you wanted as long as you only wanted regular roman.

In 1961, Stempel, the parent company of the Haas Type Foundry decided to market the new san serif font in Germany, and they changed the name to Helvetica. Hoffmann and Miedinger resisted the name change because it sounded like the Latin word for Switzerland, “Helvetia.” Stempel forced the name change and a star was born.

This was the middle of the Swiss design movement—a style of design that said design should be an objective communication of ideas and not an artistic expression.

In 1964, the American company Linotype, now the parent company of the Haas Type Foundry, adopted Helvetica as the logotype on all of their equipment. This was just the beginning, as companies and designers all over the world viewed Helvetica as the font that reflected the industrial times.

Four years after its birth, Helvetica was given an oblique brother. More weights were added later, but they were made by different designers in diverse foundries, but these lacked consistency, and Helvetica became a hodge podge of different fonts.

Linotype has since redrawn every style and weight of the font to make a consistent family of typefaces. Differences in alignment were corrected, subtle features were made consistent from one face to another, and all the weights and widths were designed to work together as one family. This new family is called Neue Helvetica, and is available from, among others, Adobe.

Today, Helvetica is shunned by many designers because it is overused due to its being the default typeface on many desktop publishing software packages. But, remember, it is the default face because it is such a reliable, workhorse of a typeface. Together with Times New Roman, Helvetica was the most specified face of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.

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