Walter Haettenschweiler

Walter Haettenschweiler is a Swiss type designer, born in 1933 in Zug. He studied at Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich, and from 1957 onwards he ran a design studio in Zug.

Typefaces

Haettenschweiler Typeface

Today, he is most famous for the black headline typeface Haettenschweiler. The font is used by the French magazine Paris Match for headlines and by the British football club Nottingham Forest - slightly modified - in its logo. Microsoft used it for Microsoft Office. He is most famous for the black headline typeface Haettenschweiler (1954)---a renaming of schmalfette Grotesk by Photoscript in the photo font era---, which made it to the Microsoft library in 1995 as part of Microsoft Office. Haettenschweiler was used by Paris Match for headlines. The soccer team Nottingham Forest has a logo based on it as well.

Haettenschweiler was designed in 1954 by Walter Haettenschweiler and Armin Haab on the basis of the narrow bold Grotesk. The narrow bold Grotesk was originally used for the book Lettera. This new narrow but very bold typeface was subsequently imitated by many others and had a significant influence on typeface design. For example, a similar variant of Helvetica (typeface) was drawn, called Helvetica Inserat. Impact (font) also has a similar design approach. Photoscript designed other versions of the narrow-bodied Grotesk, which were distributed under the name Haettenschweiler in honour of Walter Haettenschweiler. The typeface subsequently became known worldwide under this name.

Typeface List

His typefaces, often published in the Lettera book series (Lettera2, 1961; Lettera3, 1968 and Lettera4, 1972) all printed by Teufen.

Influence

Walter Haettenschweiler inspired the Schmalfette CP typeface designed by Jason Walcott.