Neue Haas Unica: Helvetica Font Redesigned
The legendary font Helvetica has been around for a good 30 years. It has been rumored that it would be given a redesign… and now we know the rumors were true. With this commercial follow-up to the traditional Helvetica font, Haas Unica, has been rediscovered and relaunched by Monotype. It has been redrawn from scratch as to keep with the design needs of the digital age. If you love the forms of Helvetica, but are frustrated with the aspects of it that do not render properly on computer and device screens, then Neue Haas Unica could be your new favorite sans-serif font.
From the article about Helvetica Font Redesigned:
And because it had been designed for the hot metal typesetting techniques prevalent in the 1950s, it hadn’t translated perfectly to the phototypesetting process that became popular in the 1970s.
So, in 1974, Haas, the centuries-old Swiss type foundry that had introduced Helvetica in 1957, commissioned a Swiss design team called Team’77 to come up with a follow-up to the world’s most popular typeface…
By the time they finished Unica, however, Haas was going out of business. Further, the typographic world was on the verge of being rocked by another new technology: desktop publishing… In the years that followed, Unica slipped into obscurity, accumulating a sort of mythology along the way…
In late 2012, Rhatigan was visiting Monotype’s outpost in Germany, which had previously been the office of storied typesetting outfit Mergenthaler Linotype Company. He was rooting around in storage, looking for old material, when he happened upon a box of tracing paper and transparent sheets. The transparent pages each had a single letter, crisp and clean and ten inches tall: The photographic film masters for Unica…
