Job:03171 Title:Typography Referenced (Rockport)
Page: 96
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Typography, Referenced
Text
Job:03171 Title:Typography Referenced (Rockport)
Page: 96
Max Miedinger
Swiss, –
Typefaces: Pro Arte (1954), Helvetica (1956),
Monospace 821, Neue Haas Grotesk (1957),
Horizontal (1964)
James Montalbano
American, –
Typefaces: Orbon (1995), Freddo (1996), Nora (1997),
Clearview (2004), Moraine (2010), Trilon (2011)
James Montalbano’s professional career began as a
public school graphic arts teacher in New York City.
Following graduate studies in technology education,
he studied lettering with Ed Benguiat (80), and began
working as a graphic designer and art director at
various type foundries and trade publications.
In , he formed Terminal Design, Inc., and began
to concentrate on lettering and typeface design. He
has created custom typeface designs for editorial,
corporate, government, and publishing clients including
International Typeface Corporation (128), Warner Music,
The American Medical Association, Vanity Fair, Vogue,
Men’s Vogue, Gourmet, Mademoiselle, Details, Glamour,
Fortune, Scribner, J. C. Penney, , and MillerCoors.
In , he completed a new family of typefaces for
the U. S. National Park Service, and for the past few years
he has been involved with Meeker & Associates in the
development of the Clearview type system for text, display,
roadway, and an interior guide sign program.
Montalbano has taught typography and type design
at the Pratt Institute (349), Parsons The New School
for Design (349), and the School of Visual Arts (349)
in New York City.
Living Social, 2010
Max Miedinger was born in in Zurich, Switzerland.
Between and , Miedinger trained as a typesetter
and attended evening classes at the Kunstgewerbeschule.
In the early 1950s (22), he became an in-house type
designer with Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein,
Switzerland. He designed his most famous typeface,
Helvetica (176), in ; it is still the most widely used
sans serif in the world.
It was at the Haas where Edouard Hoff mann asked
Miedinger to adapt the foundry’s existing Haas Grotesk to
accommodate current taste. Haas Grotesk had its origins
in nineteenth-century German work such as Berthold’s
Akzidenz Grotesk. The new typeface, created from
Miedinger’s china-ink drawings, was a new design in its
own right rather than one with minor modifi cations, as
had been the original plan. Neue Haas Grotesk, as it was
then called, proved extremely popular. When D. Stempel
AG in Germany released the typeface in , the foundry
called it Helvetica—the traditional Latin name for
“Switzerland,” to capitalize on the increasing popularity of
Swiss typography. Although Helvetica was not planned as
a diverse family of weights like that of Adrian Frutiger’s
(88) Univers (181), several designers have added to it
during the past thirty years. These additional weights are
available on most typesetting systems.
Two of Miedinger’s other typefaces, Pro Arte, a revival
of a nineteenth-century poster typeface, and Horizontal,
a heavy, square, titling face, were atypical in terms of his
style and approach.
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