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Helvetica vs. Akzidenz Grotesk Font

In: Other Topics

Submitted By doftin
Words 289
Pages 2
Every font that we use has its identity and all of them serve excellent features for different needs. In my short writing I will talk about famous fonts Helvetica and its early version Akzidenz Grotesk. Max Miedinger designed Helvetica in 1957. After that time, Helvetica has a big effect on design industry for many years. It is still being used by major brands as well as various governments and doing a positive job to deliver message or product to consumers in today’s world. It is really well designed typeface that you can’t miss on anywhere you see it. Basically, it is characterized by its smooth, modern, and well-organized individualities.

Akzidenz Grotesk font was designed by H. Berthold in 1896. I never used this font before so I made a little search about it. The first thing that I noticed, it can be called early version of Helvetica and the first sans serif typeface that was commonly used. Also connections between Helvetica and Akzidenz Grotesk are obvious. However, Akzidenz-Grotesk is generally thought to remain more circular, less wide and there are also couple sensitive differences. On Wikipedia website it says “ the uppercase and lowercase C and the uppercase G, J, R and Q. Aside from the subtle differences in these individual letters, Miedinger's primary change to Akzidenz-Grotesk is Helvetica's higher x-height, the distance from the baseline to the height of the lowercase letter x. The general effect is that Helvetica appears more oblong while Akzidenz-Grotesk maintains circular counters and bowls.”

As a result, both Helvetica and Akzidenz Grotesk is one of the popular and most convincing typefaces used to date in the world and Helvetica might be the most easily identifiable typeface ever

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