Max Miedinger

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 Neue Helvetica™, based on the earlier Helvetica™.

2001: Linotype publishes Helvetica™ World 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, Helvetica™ (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.