WHO REALLY DESIGNED TIMES AND HELVETICA?

An historical paradox, revealed and resolved

David Jury, in his new book, Type Designers of the 20th Century, would have been remiss not to include, amongst the 38 chosen exemplars of the art, those responsible for the two most popular typefaces of the era—Stanley Morison, for Times New Roman, and Max Miedinger, for Helvetica.

But Stanley Morison, for all his genius, was not in fact a type designer. There is only one typeface attributed to him, Times New Roman, which he himself modestly describes as having “excogitated.”¹ He drew the sketches (since lost) for the design, and the first draft was done by Victor Lardent, who worked as a graphic designer in the publicity department of The Times newspaper, specializing in lettering for advertising headlines; the final drafting was done at the Monotype factory. Morison was therefore the art director of the typeface. Formally, he was Typographic Advisor to the British Monotype Corporation, which published Times New Roman, and many of the best typefaces of the century, under his aegis.

Max Miedinger did draw Helvetica, or Haas New Grotesk, as it was first named. Other than Helvetica, he has little renown as a type designer, with only one or two other fonts to his credit. The Haas foundry had its own Morisonian figure, Eduard Hoffman, with the company since 1917 and manager since 1944. He was Helvetica’s art director, and the record of his close collaboration with Miedinger exists, in the form of a notebook recording the development of the typeface.

Who is the designer: the art director or the draftsman? In comparison, then, with the importance of the roles of art director and draftsman flipped, the attribution of authorship in these two typefaces seems arbitrary, or at least dependent on specific context—which will now be addressed.

Excelsior Type. Centre spread of 4-page, 8”x 10” direct mail flyer, designed by Paul Smith for Mergenthaler Linotype Co., 1933. (In the Thirteenth Annual of Advertising Art, Art Directors Club, New York, 1934.) This shows the type design strategy of Linotype’s Legibilty Group, based on optimizing the Didone or Modern genre—quite different from the old-style that is Times Roman.

Times New Roman: designing the process

In 1929, Stanley Morison had been Typographic Advisor at British Monotype for five years, during which time he had developed the revivals Fournier and Bembo, and two new designs by Eric Gill—Perpetua and Gill Sans. All incredibly fabulous and successful, but not achieved without some struggle along the way. In particular, Morison’s idea of imparting the chiseled quality of Gill’s stone carving to metal type via the insertion of a French punch cutter into the work flow, in advance of the engineering drawings usually practised at Monotype, did not proceed smoothly.² This was all valuable experience in management and creative direction.

Morison was an idealist and widely engaged. In 1929 he dissed the typography of The Times in the Monotype Recorder, the trade journal edited by Beatrice Warde, to which he often contributed. He mentioned the Legibility Group of newspaper types masterminded by Chauncey Griffith for American Linotype from 1925 on, as a spur if not a remedy. The gauntlet had been thrown, and The Times took the challenge, appointing him their Typographic Advisor too, following his presentation in 1930 of a specially printed 38-page proposal, Memorandum on a Proposal to Revise the Typography of The Times.

There then followed an extensive, methodical and open-minded program of technical and optical research testing the three main classes of serif type—Old-style (Plantin), Transitional (Baskerville) and Modern (Ionic), and a specially recut version of Perpetua with shortened extenders—all put through their paces on high-speed curved stereo plates on newsprint. He was acquainting himself with the lie of the land, the nature of the beast and what might best tame it.

Next, preliminary drawings were made, in the offices of The Times, by Lardent presumably, of the design which would subsequently be built out by more hands, anonymously, at Monotype.³ It was no doubt expedient for Morison to involve Lardent in the process, rather than work entirely through Monotype’s Type Drawing Office, but why can only be guessed. As the high-profile architect of this procedure, from which he deduced the radical and counterintuitive idea that an old-style (informed by Monotype’s Plantin of 1913) might best suit a contemporary newspaper, it is thus not entirely inappropriate that the great excogitator be considered the author and inventor of Times New Roman. Its designer, even.

Helvetica: victorious in a competition of nuance

In the 1950s, the main narrative of graphic design modernism centred on the Swiss Style, and Akzidenz Grotesk (or Standard as it was known in North America), published by the Berlin foundry Berthold, was its go-to typeface. The more ostensibly modern geometric style epitomized by Futura had fallen from favour, tainted by its association with the harsh idealism of the earlier century—a link, however spurious, to the extremes of social engineering in national socialism and communism. The acknowledged leader of The New Typography of the 1920s, Jan Tschichold, in exile in Switzerland during the war, came to embrace traditionalism, loathing his prior role as “führer” of The New Typography.

“[The Third Reich] could not bear the genuine modernists who, although political opponents, were nevertheless unwittingly not so far from the delusion of ‘order’ that ruled the Third Reich. The role of leader that fell to me…signified…an intellectual guardianship of ‘followers’ typical of dictatorial states.” ⁠—⁠Jan Tschichold, 1946. Quoted from Ruari MacLean’s Jan Tschichold: typographer.

Berthold-Schriften specimen book, 1965. Akzidenz-Grotesk, 20 pt and 24 pt. Note the excessive weight of the lower case “s”, and the different terminal angle of “e,” between the sizes—such idiosyncrasies were common in foundry type.

Despite the anti-ideological appeal of Akzidenz Grotesk, this 1890s summation of the ur-sans that originated in the 1830s was, as realized in metal, a bit rough around the edges, with inconsistencies in the weight of characters, and in the angle of lower case terminals in different sizes. The nonetheless charming, and, in its own way, sophisticated quality of foundry type—how the design is noticeably different at different sizes—was out of sync with the emergent photo-technology of typography, in which a single master served for many sizes. The expression of this smooth, scalable new aesthetic would explode upon the world of typography as the neo-grotesque genre.

The Type Specimen Book, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1974. Folio, Bauer’s update of Akzidenz-Grotesk, was the first of the neo-grotesques to hit the scene in 1957.

1957: the neo-grotesque meme goes viral

With the shortcomings of old metal Akzidenz in mind, the Bauer foundry in Frankfurt, Germany released its highly polished interpretation of AG, named Folio, in 1957. The Amsterdam Type Foundry published Mercator in January 1958. And in Switzerland, The Haas foundry in Basel released Haas Neue Grotesk in 1957. This would later be renamed Helvetica when taken up by Linotype—the largest international type “platform” of the day—to cash in, quite legitimately, on the vogue for the Swiss Style. Again in 1957, Univers, also a neo-grotesque, although not directly informed by Akzidenz Grotesk, was launched in France by Deberny & Peignot. A banner year indeed! Notably, AG itself was smartened up by Berthold much later, in 1969.

Internationale catalogus van drukletters, Lettergieterij Amsterdam, 1968. The Mercator typeface, designed by Dick Dooijes, was the Dutch foundry’s version of the neo-grotesque meme that went viral in 1957.

Apart from its name, the design edge goes to Helvetica, over its fellow Akzidenz derivatives, Folio and Mercator, due to the sublime drawing of its curves and its exquisite spacing, producing solid and even colour at every size and weight, and I suspect it was the appreciation that Eduard Hoffman had for Max’s ability to gracefully express his boss’s conception, that led Eduard to credit the design to his employee. Besides which, it was 25 years after Times New Roman, in a different foundry in another country.

The lack of a body of work: strange?

Nowadays, its relatively easy to make fonts (and will only become more so with AI). I’ve designed, drawn and engineered around fifty typefaces since I encountered the Fontographer application in 1993, comprising hundreds of fonts, several with Latin, Greek and Cyrillic support and over a thousand glyphs each. Such profligacy from one person is now routine, yet was impossible prior to the digital age, and most 20th century type designers side-gigged from adjacent professions to design a handful of typefaces, and that’s all. They were more in the line of calligraphers, graphic designers, illustrators and typographers, very accomplished with a pen and brush, and well versed in the print medium. So to criticize Morison, Lardent, Hoffman and Miedinger for the limited size of their oeuvre is a little unfair. Not everyone was a Benton or a Frutiger.

Nonetheless, when digital font pioneer Mike Parker proposed the theory, in 1994, that Times New Roman was designed by brilliant American engineer William Starling Burgess in 1904, the evidence was generally dismissed, and the fact that Burgess had no connections with type founding other than that suggested by Parker was not inconsequential.

My Times New Roman and Akzidenz Grotesk

Beaufort is based on Times and Plantin. Like Morison, I too was adapting form to medium, in this case exploiting the ability of digital fonts to render very sharp serifs, and also giving Beaufort low contrast because of the low resolution of laser printers and desktop monitors in 1997, when it was designed.

Figgins Sans, in the manner of a 19th century grotesque, is the closest I’ve come to Akzidenz Grotesk, with a similarly smallish x-height.

These are typefaces that I can claim to have conceived, designed and drawn tout seul, a wonderful privilege of the digital age that I share with, it is estimated, several thousand type designers at mid-sized or boutique foundries around the world. The situation was quite different in the twentieth century, when the major industrial processes separated design and drafting. ●

¹ A Tally of Types, Stanley Morison, Cambridge University Press, 1974.
² The Story of Perpetua, Tiffany Wardle, University of Reading, 2000.
³ Times Roman: A Revaluation. Peggy Lang, Alphabet and Image: 2, Published by James Shand at the Shenval Press, 1946.