Max Miedinger – born 24.12.1910 in Zurich, Switzerland, died 8.3.1980 in Zurich, Switzerland – type designer.
1926-30: trains as a typesetter in Zurich, after which he attends evening classes at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich. 1936-46: typographer for Globus department store’s advertising studio in Zurich. 1947-56: customer counselor and typeface sales representative for the Haas’sche Schriftgießerei in Münchenstein near Basle. From 1956 onwards: freelance graphic artist in Zurich.
1956: Eduard Hoffmann, the director of the Haas’sche Schriftgießerei, commissions Miedinger to develop a new sans-serif typeface. 1957: the Haas-Grotesk face is introduced. 1958: introduction of the roman (or normal) version of Haas-Grotesk. 1959: introduction of a bold Haas-Grotesk. 1960: the typeface changes its name from Neue Haas Grotesk to Helvetica™.
1983: Linotype publishes its , based on the earlier Helvetica™.
2001: Linotype publishes an update to the classic Helvetica design using the OpenType font format with multilingual characterset. It contains the following Microsoft code pages:
1252 Latin 1, 1250 Latin 2 Eastern, 1251 Cyrillic, 1253 Greek, 1254 Turk, 1255 Hebrew, 1256 Arabic, 1257 Windows Baltic, 1258 Windows Vietnamese, as well as a mixture of box drawing element glyphs and mathematical symbols operators.
In total, each weight of Helvetica World contains 1866 different glyph characters!
Fonts: Pro Arte (1954), Haas-Grotesk, (1957 onwards), Horizontal (1965).
* TYPOGRAPHY – An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Throughout History by Friedrich Friedl, Nicolaus Ott (Editor), Bernard Stein, published by Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft mbH.
Neue Helvetica and Helvetica are trademarks of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG, which may be registered in certain jurisdictions, exclusively licensed through Linotype GmbH, a wholly owned subsidiary of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG.
