I’ll probably rewatch the Helvetica documentary for this project.
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“Designed by Max Miedinger in 1957, Helvetica filled the need for a no-nonsense, fully functional sans serif typeface to meet the austere standards of Swiss design. Helvetica was produced by several typefoundries and released in many weights and widths; its simplicity makes it suitable for just about any purpose including short texts, signage, and advertising copy. This Helvetica Cyrillic was designed in-house in the 70s at D. Stempel AG, then critiqued and redesigned in 1992 under the advice of Jovica Veljovic, a gifted and knowledgeable type designer and lettering artist. Use Helvetica Cyrillic, with its clean lines and straightforward appearance, for setting signage, notices, broadsides, charts and graphs, and any material that might be difficult to decipher.
Max Miedinger designed Helvetica Inserat in 1957 primarily for use in the advertising industry. It is a compressed and bold sans serif design and ideal for newspaper advertising; its ability to fit several words in a small space gives it added dimension. It is also good for signage that will be seen in situations that are less than ideal. Helvetica Inserat Cyrillic was designed in-house in the 70s at D. Stempel AG, then critiqued and redesigned in 1992 under the advice of Jovica Veljovic, a gifted and knowledgeable type designer and lettering artist.”
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“Originally designed 1957-1961 by Max Miedinger with art direction by Eduard Hoffmann. Released as Neue Haas Grotesk by the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei, and then revised and released as Helvetica by Linotype AG.
Neue Haas Grotesk underwent its first radical transformation when it was refitted to work on Linotype casters, with duplexed Regular and Bold weights. This forced the Bold to redrawn with a considerably narrower proportion. It was transformed again during the transition from metal to phototypesetting, redrawn and rationalized as Neue Helvetica in the 1980s, and was digitized in the earliest days of Postscript type. Much of the warm personality of Miedinger’s shapes was lost along the way, so rather than trying to rethink Helvetica or improve on current digital versions, this was more of a restoration project: bringing Miedinger’s original Neue Haas Grotesk back to life with as much fidelity to his original shapes and spacing as possible (albeit with the addition of kerning, an expensive luxury in handset type).
Miedinger’s original Neue Haas Grotesk included a number of interesting alternates, including a cedilla that looked more like a flattened comma (preferred, apparently, by the French speakers among the Swiss Modernists), but the most striking was a straight-legged R, available in each of his handful of original weights by special order only.
Neue Haas Grotesk was originally produced for typesetting by hand in a range of sizes from 5 to 72 (and even larger in the Helvetica Plakat woodtypes that were produced later), but digital Helvetica has always been one-size-fits-all, which leads to unfortunate compromises, not just with the spacing, which was has ended up much looser than Miedinger’s wonderfully tight original at display sizes but much too tight for comfortable reading at text sizes, but also with the overall weight (a proper Regular for display looks too light as text, but a proper Medium has the opposite problem) and with details like ink traps, which keep M or W from clogging in text but look awkward and strange in a headline.”
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“The history of Helvetica includes a number of twists and turns. There are, in fact, two versions of Helvetica. The first one is the original design, which was created by Max Miedinger and released by Linotype in 1957. And secondly, in 1983, D. Stempel AG, Linotype’s daughter company, released the Neue Helvetica® font design, which was a re-working of the 1957 original. In addition, Linotype released the Neue Helvetica Prodesign in 2004, which is an OpenType version with expanded foreign language support.
So why was this classic redesigned in 1983? Since its original launch, Helvetica had been worked on by a variety of designers to adapt it for successive methods of composition, from hot metal to photocomposition to digital. In addition, given the technical limitations of some methods, the character weights, widths and spacing were inconsistent and compromised. As technologies improved, these limitations were removed, allowing total design freedom.
It was these changes that led to the reworking of this very popular workhorse in 1983, when the complete Helvetica font family was carefully redrawn and expanded. The outcome was the Neue Helvetica design, a synthesis of aesthetic and technical refinements and modifications that resulted in improved appearance, legibility and usefulness.”
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