Helvetica is one of the most famous and popular typefaces in the world. It lends an air of lucid efficiency to any typographic message with its clean, no-nonsense shapes. The original typeface was called Neue Haas Grotesk, and was designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger for the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) in Switzerland. In 1960 the name was changed to Helvetica (an adaptation of “Helvetia”, the Latin name for Switzerland).
Helvetica family pack comprises 28 weights: Helvetica® Std Light,Light Oblique,Roman,Oblique,Bold,Bold Oblique,Black,Black Oblique,Light Condensed,Light Condensed Oblique,Condensed,Condensed Oblique,Bold Condensed,Bold Condensed Oblique,Black Condensed,Black Condensed Oblique,Compressed,Extra Compressed,Ultra Compressed,Inserat Roman,Rounded Bold,Rounded Bold Oblique,Rounded Black,Rounded Black Oblique,Rounded Bold Condensed,Rounded Bold Condensed Oblique,Fractions Roman & Fractions Bold. It is also available as Single Weight. Please contact alt.TYPE for purchase options.
Helvetica is among the most widely used sans serif typefaces and has been a popular choice for corporate logos, including those for 3M, American Airlines, American Apparel, BMW, Jeep, JCPenney, Lufthansa, Microsoft, Mitsubishi Electric, Orange, Target, Toyota, Panasonic, Motorola, Kawasaki and Verizon Wireless. Apple has incorporated Helvetica in the iOS® platform and the iPod® device. Helvetica is widely used by the U.S. government, most notably on federal income tax forms, and NASA selected the type for the space shuttle orbiters. Over the years, Helvetica™ was expanded to include many different weights, but these were not coordinated with each other. In 1983, D. Stempel AG redesigned and digitized the “Neue Helvetica™” typeface for Linotype and made it a self-contained font family.
Neue Helvetica family comprises 51 weights: Neue Helvetica® Std 25 Ultra Light,26 Ultra Light Italic,35 Thin,36 Thin Italic,45 Light, 46 Light Italic, 55 Roman,56 Italic, 65 Medium,66 Medium Italic,75 Bold,76 Bold Italic,85 Heavy,86 Heavy Italic,95 Black,96 Black Italic,75 Bold Outline,27 Ultra Light Condensed,27 Ultra Light Condensed Oblique,37 Thin Condensed,37 Thin Condensed Oblique,47 Light Condensed,47 Light Condensed Oblique,57 Condensed,57 Condensed Oblique,67 Medium Condensed,67 Medium Condensed Oblique,77 Bold Condensed,77 Bold Condensed Oblique,87 Heavy Condensed,87 Heavy Condensed Oblique,97 Black Condensed,97 Black Condensed Oblique,107 Extra Black Condensed,107 Extra Black Condensed Oblique,23 Ultra Light Extended 23 Ultra Light Extended Oblique,33 Thin Extended,33 Thin Extended Oblique,43 Light Extended,43 Light Extended Oblique,53 Extended,53 Extended Oblique,63 Medium Extended,63 Medium Extended Oblique,73 Bold Extended,73 Bold Extended Oblique,83 Heavy Extended,83 Heavy Extended Oblique,93 Black Extended & 93 Black Extended Oblique. It is also available as Single Weight. Please contact alt.TYPE for purchase options.
Helvetica World: font for global communications
At the beginning of the 21st Century, Linotype again released an updated design of Helvetica, the Helvetica World typeface family. This family is much smaller in terms of its number of fonts, but each font makes up for this in terms of language support. Helvetica World supports a number of languages and writing systems from all over the globe, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Vietnamese scripts. It is available in four weights: Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic
Helvetica World, an update to the classic Helvetica design using the OpenType font format, 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!
