President of the company, Eduard Hoffmann, saw an opportunity and commissioned former Haas salesman and designer, Max Miedinger, to design a new Haas Grotesk. By the mid-1950s, its narrow and boxy design became less popular with contemporary Swiss designers. Work on Neue Haas Grotesk began early in the fall of 1956. neue haas grotesk Over the following months Miedinger and Hoffmann diligently exchanged drawings, proofs, and comparisons with the old grotesks. The most distinctive features of the new typeface were consistently horizontal stroke terminals, large x-height, and extremely tight spacing. The original success of Neue Haas Grotesk was aided by well-executed marketing efforts. Adopted by many graphic designers it became a hallmark of contemporary Swiss graphic design. To truly compete with other sans serifs in the global type market, Hoffmann knew it was important to make Neue Haas Grotesk available for machine composition. In June 1959 he made a deal with D. In the beginning, only the Linotype version of the typeface was referred to as Helvetica. The hand-set type continued to be sold as Neue Haas Grotesk for several years, with some catalogs even using both names side by side. This made sense because the design had to be significantly altered for the limitations of the Linotype machine. Designed by Hans Neuburg and Nelly Rudin. Deviations over time After its original release, Neue Haas Grotesk was subjected to many design compromises. Hasty family expansions The immediate success of Neue Haas Grotesk and Neue haas grotesk put pressure on Haas and Stempel to issue additional weights and styles as quickly as possible. Older typefaces were hastily tweaked and renamed to meet the demand for a larger family, leading to many inconsistencies in design and proportions between the various fonts. One matrix can be used to cast two forms of the same character: usually either regular and italic, or regular and bold. As such, both forms have to be exactly the same width. Helvetica was created for the Linotype by refitting all styles of Neue Haas Grotesk, making the regular weight looser and the medium weight more dense. The italic technically an oblique was completely redrawn by Stempel, and the medium weight was made slightly bolder. Also, the size of each glyph had to be slightly reduced to accommodate uppercase accents. From metal to film For metal type, separate matrices were created to cast each size of a typeface. This allowed the design to be adjusted for each size, optimizing spacing, proportions, and weight as needed. Photo-typesetting, on the other hand, enabled the infinite scaling of just one master design. To preserve at least some of the adjustments traditionally made for different sizes, foundries provided up to four sets of masters to be used for different ranges of size. Early Linotype photo-setting systems worked with a restrictive 18-unit system for the character widths later 54 units. Neue haas grotesk again implied that all styles had to be redrawn and respaced. This straight-legged R — a drawing for phototype production in the Linotype archives — was one of several alternate forms originally available for Neue Haas Grotesk and Helvetica. The digital era and Neue Helvetica Because of its vast popularity, Helvetica was among the first typefaces to be adapted for digital typesetting. Unfortunately, many of the design limitations from analog systems were carried over to the digital realm. For example, the version of Helvetica that comes with every Macintosh computer today, digitized in the early days of PostScript, still retains the coarse 18-unit width system from the phototype era. Many of its curves lack finesse and its oblique was created by automatically slanting the roman. In comparison with the original smooth curves of Neue Haas Grotesk leftNeue Helvetica is more boxy right. In 1982 Linotype set out to revise and systematize the hodgepodge of fonts Helvetica had become over years. Adopting a numeric naming system from the former competitor typeface, Univers, styles and weights were coordinated and complemented. The height of capitals and lower case were aligned throughout the family. Yet the wish for regularization led to new compromises: condensed and expanded styles required squarer forms, which had to be adopted for the normal width, again sacrificing some of the personality of the rounder original. Neue Haas Grotesk Display 66 Medium Italic 54 points 54 points linespacing A Proper Revival After half a century of compromises, Neue Haas Grotesk has finally gotten the digitization it deserves. In 2004 Christian Schwartz was commissioned to digitize Neue Haas Grotesk. The project, which he refers to as a restoration, was completed in 2010. Additionally, he incorporated alternative glyphs, like the straight-legged R which had been available in pre-digital formats. Other amenities like an Ultra Thin weight, drawn by Berton Hasebe, and additional numeral sets were added, but the essence of Neue Haas Grotesk was preserved throughout. For more details on the digital restoration, see the neue haas grotesk.
