The Return of Neue Haas Grotesk

Last week my friend Gary was at our home and we were dis­cussing the iPad 2. Gary is a recent con­vert to the reli­gion of Apple. I was shar­ing with Gary some of the videos I have on my iPad when Gary noticed the key art for one of the ter­rific doc­u­men­taries by another Gary, Gary Hus­twit. “Hel­vetica?!” he exclaimed, “Is that a movie about a type­face?” When I replied in the affir­ma­tive, his amused shock was even more evi­dent. The obvi­ous sub­text was, “Design­ers [like you, Bill] are a strange bunch.” Again, to that, I must reply in the affir­ma­tive.

I believe there is noth­ing closer to typo­graphic per­fec­tion than Hel­vetica; in my own list of the best type­faces, it comes in at an undis­puted num­ber 1. (Gara­mond is sec­ond). In its best form Hel­vetica is a type­face with­out equal. The per­fect typo­graphic ves­sel to hold and con­vey infor­ma­tion con­tained within the writ­ten word. It’s an exquis­ite raw mate­r­ial for a designer to use. No fuss, no arti­fice. Its ele­gantly pro­por­tioned char­ac­ters can be used effec­tively to express just about any­thing. The renowned designer Mas­simo Vignelli makes this clear in Hustwit’s doc­u­men­tary Hel­vetica, “You can say ‘I love you.’ in Hel­vetica. And you can say it with Hel­vetica Extra Light if you want to be really fancy. Or you can say it with the Extra Bold if it’s really intense and pas­sion­ate. And it might work. You can also use Hel­vetica to say ‘I hate you…’’’

But not all Hel­veti­cas are equal. Linotype’s Neue Hel­vetica in its Open­type Pro edi­tion was the best dig­i­tal ver­sion I’d known of up to now. When I did a video in 2009 for Hyundai and we selected Hel­vetica as our type­face for the many titles in the 4 minute video, I made the deci­sion to bud­get for a pur­chase of that type­face fam­ily. It was more than just an aes­thetic choice. The bet­ter crafted type­faces are much eas­ier to use; so much less time needs to be devoted to tweak­ing let­ter spac­ing. An excel­lently built and anno­tated type­face has expertly-executed kern­ing pairs and lig­a­tures that make any designer a bet­ter typog­ra­pher. Basic older cuts of Hel­vetica are crude by com­par­i­son.

Hel­vetica was born as Neue Haas Grotesk (NHG), sired by designer Max Miedinger. It was the prod­uct of the Haas Type Foundry of München­stein, Switzer­land. NHG debuted in 1957. Haas’ par­ent com­pany Stem­pel renamed NHG Hel­vetica when it released the type­face inter­na­tion­ally in 1960. Over the years changes have been made to the type­face by resellers like Linotype.

While I’m enam­ored with the Lino­type Hel­vetica Neue fam­ily, I am really excited about a new kid on the block. Chris­t­ian Schwartz, designer/proprietor of the excel­lent Com­mer­cial type foundry has cre­ated a redrawn ver­sion of Neue Haas Grotesk with orig­i­nal options avail­able and sub­tle but impor­tant changes made for both text and title ver­sions. No less an author­ity than designer-type icon Erik Spiek­er­mann has named Chris­t­ian Schwartz as one of the best type design­ers work­ing today. Schwartz returned to Miedinger’s orig­i­nal designs to recre­ate the type­face as closely as he could to the designer’s orig­i­nal cre­ation. The NHG project was begun in 2004 as an early design for The Guardian. It was com­pleted in 2010 for the relaunch of the exquis­itely designed mag­a­zine Bloomberg Busi­ness­week.

As shown in the exam­ples above, there are notable dif­fer­ences in the Lino­type edi­tion of Neue Hel­vetica and Schwartz’s ver­sion of Neue Haas Grotesk. In each case I set the type in the same size and weight in Neue Hel­vetica from Lino­type, and then in the New Neue Haas Grotesk (Dis­play or Text, depend­ing on the usage). First off, rather than a one-cut-suits-all-uses approach as in Neue Hel­vetica, NHG reveals its exper­tise in both dis­play and text ver­sions. The illus­tra­tions reveal that when set nor­mally (no track­ing) the Neue Hel­vetica seems too widely spaced in its dis­play ver­sion (“typog­ra­phy”) and too tightly spaced when set in text sizes. Word spac­ing is vastly improved in NHG, as is let­ter fit. There is also an improved bal­ance in the over­all appear­ance of the char­ac­ters of the NHG ver­sion. Another option I’m par­tic­u­larly fond of is the alter­nate ver­sion of the upper case R as seen in the first graphic in this post.

Lino­type will soon be sell­ing the Neue Haas Grotesk fam­ily, But Schwartz’s own Com­mer­cial foundry is sell­ing it from today until April 30. I’m uncer­tain whether the price will change, but I do like the idea of putting money in the designer’s pocket. At $750 it isn’t exactly cheap; as I’ve stated pre­vi­ously, if you make your liv­ing with them, qual­ity tools are worth the money.