The original metal Neue Haas Grotesk™ would, in the late 1950s become Helvetica®. But, over the years, Helvetica would move away from its roots. Some of the features that made Neue Haas Grotesk so good were expunged or altered owing to comprimises dictated by technological changes. Christian Schwartz says Neue Haas Grotesk was originally produced for typesetting by hand in a range of sizes from 5 to 72 points, but digital Helvetica has always been one-size-fits-all, which leads to unfortunate compromises."""" Schwartz's digital revival sets the record straight, so to speak. What was lost in Neue Haas Grotesk's transition to the digital Helvetica of today, has been resurrected in this faithful digital revival. The Regular and Bold weights of Helvetica were redesigned for the Linotype machine; those alterations remained when Helvetica was adapted for phototypesetting. During the 1980s, the family was redrawn and released as Neue Helvetica. Schwartz's revival of the original Helvetica, his new Neue Haas Grotesk, comes complete with a number of Max Miedinger's alternates, including a flat-legged R. Eight display weights, from Thin to Black, plus a further three weights drawn specifically for text make this much more than a revival - it's a versatile, well-drawn grot with all the right ingredients. The Thin weight (originally requested by Bloomberg Businessweek) is very fine, very thin indeed, and reveals the true skeleton of these iconic letterforms. Available as a family of OpenType fonts with a very large Pro character set, Neue Haas Grotesk supports most Central European and many Eastern European languages.

Contax Pro is a contemporary design based on generous proportions and clean, crisp lines. Forget about 'Helvetica'. Look out 'Univers'. Contax Pro is the new geometric sans typeface series for the 21st century. Contax Pro makes for easy reading and is ideal for long lines of copy. Contax Pro includes true drawn small capitals and old style figures. The family comes in 6 weights: ultra light, thin, light, regular, medium and bold.

The initial idea of timesquare typeface inspired by Helvetica when presenting the board information on a subway escalator in Time Square, Manhattan, New York. This confirms strength the legend of Helvetica is not lost amid rampant nice fonts in the site. Therefore it should not appropriate that this timesquare fonts come to rival the greatness of Helvetica. Fonts timesquare thrive (since 2008 for self used) of the basic forms of Helvetica to timesquare born in different shapes and sizes. The greatest challenge during development timesquare is both shape similarity to Helvetica directly, as well as to other fonts inspired by Helvetica. Timesquare's main characteristics are the wide character, modern touch and individually, can work well on a wide variety of applications in books, brochures and magazines as well as applications in advertising. This typeface has been developed on the Latin character sets. Hopefully useful.

The first weights of Neue Haas Grotesk were designed in 1957-1958 by Max Miedinger for the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei in Switzerland, with art direction by the company’s principal, Eduard Hoffmann. Neue Haas Grotesk was to be the answer to the British and German grotesques that had become hugely popular thanks to the success of functionalist Swiss typography. The typeface was soon revised and released as Helvetica by Linotype AG. As Neue Haas Grotesk had to be adapted to work on Linotype’s hot metal linecasters, Linotype Helvetica was in some ways a radically transformed version of the original. For instance, the matrices for Regular and Bold had to be of equal widths, and therefore the Bold was redrawn at a considerably narrower proportion. During the transition from metal to phototypesetting, Helvetica underwent additional modifications. In the 1980s Neue Helvetica was produced as a rationalized, standardized version. For Christian Schwartz, the assignment to design a digital revival of Neue Haas Grotesk was an occasion to set history straight. “Much of the warm personality of Miedinger’s shapes was lost along the way. So rather than trying to rethink Helvetica or improve on current digital versions, this was more of a restoration project: bringing Miedinger’s original Neue Haas Grotesk back to life with as much fidelity to his original shapes and spacing as possible (albeit with the addition of kerning, an expensive luxury in handset type).” Schwartz’s revival was originally commissioned in 2004 by Mark Porter for the redesign of The Guardian, but not used. Schwartz completed the family in 2010 for Richard Turley at Bloomberg Businessweek. Its thinnest weight was designed by Berton Hasebe.

I have always been frustrated when looking for a bold condensed face. The choices were the usual? Helvetica Bold Condensed, Univers Bold Condensed or Alternate Gothic #2... all rather dated. I was looking for a really unique, clean, uncluttered sans serif face, so I decided to design one. I have since adapted it to many logo designs. So, in my terms and conditions, I decided to permit the modification of the letter forms for logos and monograms, but logos and monograms only, not the typeface in normal usage.

Helvetica’s 50-year anniversary celebrations in 2007 were overwhelming and contagious. We saw the movie. Twice. We bought the shirts and the buttons. We dug out the homage books and re-read the hate articles. We mourned the fading non-color of an old black shirt proudly exclaiming that “HELVETICA IS NOT AN ADOBE FONT”. We took part in long conversations discussing the merits of the Swiss classic, that most sacred of typographic dreamboats, outlasting its builder and tenants to go on alone and saturate the world with the fundamental truth of its perfect logarithm. We swooned again over its subtleties (“Ah, that mermaid of an R!”). We rehashed decades-old debates about “Hakzidenz,” “improvement in mind” and “less is more.” We dutifully cursed every single one of Helvetica’s knockoffs. We breathed deeply and closed our eyes on perfect Shakti Gawain-style visualizations of David Carson hack'n'slashing Arial — using a Swiss Army knife, no less — with all the infernal post-brutality of his creative disturbance and disturbed creativity. We then sailed without hesitation into the absurdities of analyzing Helvetica’s role in globalization and upcoming world blandness (China beware! Helvetica will invade you as silently and transparently as a sheet of rice paper!). And at the end of a perfect celebratory day, we positively affirmed à la Shakti, and solemnly whispered the energy of our affirmation unto the universal mind: “We appreciate Helvetica for getting us this far. We are now ready for release and await the arrival of the next head snatcher.” The great hype of Swisspalooza '07 prompted a look at Max Miedinger, the designer of Neue Haas Grotesk (later renamed to Helvetica). Surprisingly, what little biographical information available about Miedinger indicates that he was a typography consultant and type sales rep for the Haas foundry until 1956, after which time he was a freelance graphic designer — rather than the full-time type designer most Helvetica enthusiasts presume him to have been. It was under that freelance capacity that he was commissioned to design the regular and bold weights of Neue Haas Grotesk typeface. His role in designing Helvetica was never really trumpeted until long after the typeface attained global popularity. And, again surprisingly, Miedinger designed two more typefaces that seem to have been lost to the dust of film type history. One is called Pro Arte (1954), a very condensed Playbill-like slab serif that is similar to many of its genre. The other, made in 1964, is much more interesting. Its original name was Horizontal. Here it is, lest it becomes a Haas-been, presented to you in digital form by Canada Type under the name of its original designer, Miedinger, the Helvetica King. The original film face was a simple set of bold, panoramically wide caps and figures that give off a first impression of being an ultra wide Gothic incarnation of Microgramma. Upon a second look, they are clearly more than that. This face is a quirky, very non-Akzidental take on the vernacular, mostly an exercise in geometric modularity, but also includes some unconventional solutions to typical problems (like thinning the midline strokes across the board to minimize clogging in three-storey forms). This digital version introduces four new weights, ranging from Thin to Medium, alongside the bold original. The Miedinger package comes in all popular font formats, and supports Western, Central and Eastern European languages, as well as Esperanto, Maltese, Turkish and Celtic/Welsh. A few counter-less alternates are included in the fonts.