Vill Glück zum Geburri Helvetica!
An Essay by Stephen Symons
You either love it, or despise it with a passion best reserved for matters of the heart. It’s ubiquitous, and has the ability to feel quite relaxed in the most corporatist of design environments; yet its neutrality allows it to feel equally at home amongst the digital dirt of a post modernist layout. Helvetica is no spring chicken, and celebrates its 50th birthday this year, but give or take a typographic facelift or two; it’s possibly the most widely used typeface on the planet.
Helvetica was born at the Haas Type Foundry in 1957, in Müchenstein, Switzerland. The foundry’s director, Eduard Hoffman commissioned a former employee, Max Miedinger, to design an updated version of the 1896 sans-serif typeface Akzidenz Grotesk. Miedinger’s typeface was christened Neue Haas Grotesk, but Haas’ parent company, Stempel and Linotype renamed the typeface Helvetica in 1961 when they decided to market the font internationally. Derived from Confederatio Helvetica, the Latin name for Switzerland, Helvetica would become the typeface of choice for the International Typographic Style of the 1950s and 60s .
