Helvetica and Max Miedinger: One name is well known and the other its not. This is the story of both the font and its designer.

Max Miedinger (1910-1980) trained as a typesetter in Zurich from 1926-30, and attended evening classes at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich. He was a typographer for the Globus department store’s advertising studio in Zurich, from 1936-46, and customer counselor and typeface sales representative for the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (a type foundry) in Munchenstein near Basle, 1947-56. From 1956 onwards he was a freelance graphic artist in Zurich. In 1956 Eduard Hoffmann, the director of the Haas typefoundry, commissioned Miedinger to develop a new sans serif typeface. 1958 saw the introduction of the roman (or normal or plain) version of Haas-Grotesk, which was based on the Akzidenz Grotesk typeface from 1898. Akzidenz Grotesk is a sans serif typeface originally released by the H. Berthold AG type foundry and was the model for Univers and Helvetica, among others.

It was renamed Helvetica in 1960 when the D. Stempel AG foundry purchased the typeface and added some new weights. “Helvetia” is the Latin word for Switzerland. In the 1960s Helvetica became the symbol of the Swiss school of typography and became an immediate and overwhelming success. It is a reinterpretation of earlier industrial serifless faces, but designed for increased legibility with a large x-height and more differentiation between horizontal and vertical strokes. Helvetica is a trademark of Heidelberg and licensed through Linotype Library GmbH and now part of Monotype Imaging. Varityper called it Megaron; Compugraphic called it Helios (and Triumverate when they got it right); Microsoft calls it Arial.