This can be seen clearly when characters of Walbaum and Akzidenz Grotesk are superimposed upon each other. Theinhardt and all the unknown punch cutters would have been familiar with seriffed typefaces such as Walbaum and Didot. Whoever did, on what did he base the shapes of his new letterforms? Did these sans serif forms just cross his mind or did he have some sort of model to base them on? As there was no other sans serif design available at that time, any model would have been a serif typeface, but which? It is tempting to imagine that Theinhardt was the first in Germany to design a sans serif typeface. One name, however, did survive: that of Ferdinand Theinhardt, who is known as the designer of Royal Grotesque and Breite Grotesque, two typefaces that later became members of the Akzidenz family. The different versions of the Akzidenz family were produced by anonymous punch cutters, which makes it hard to appreciate that the Grotesks were actually designed by people. Like all sans serifs from that time, Akzidenz Grotesk was meant to be used as a display face (the German word Akzidenzschrift means display face or jobbing type), but because it also included a good lowercase and different weights it was used more and more as a text face. In the years that followed Berthold managed to make a coherent family out of all the different Grotesks it had acquired, and Akzidenz Grotesk became a success. In 1896 Berthold, which had become the biggest German type foundry, started releasing the Akzidenz Grotesk family, built up from existing and new Grotesks. But even for lookalikes the differences were huge, and it was impossible to create a coherent family of typefaces as we would know one today.
![helvetica vs helvetica neue helvetica vs helvetica neue](http://www1.chapman.edu/~mathe109/matheyhelvetica/images/helvetica-neue.gif)
As type foundries merged with others or started taking over smaller ones, along with their typefaces and matrices, they tried to put all the different Grotesks together, often renaming them in an effort to create one family.
![helvetica vs helvetica neue helvetica vs helvetica neue](https://askjitendrakumar.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/helvetica-neue-alternative-roboto-sans_optimized-1024x512.jpg)
They had names such as Royal Grotesk, Breite Grotesk and Lilliput-Grotesk, and the fact that most of them included a lowercase made them suitable as a text typeface, too. Several German type foundries published their own Grotesks, some only in regular, some in bold or light, some only in one size, but always more or less lookalikes. These Grotesks turned out to be the most influential faces in the history of the sans serif, much more so than their English counterparts. In Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, the Grotesk (the German name for sans serif) gained popularity fast. From a design point of view these typefaces have little value, but it is interesting to note their existence. Two years later, William Thorowgood was the first to design a lowercase with his Seven Line Grotesque, introducing at the same time the word ‘Grotesque’. Vincent Figgins was the first to use the word sans serif when he designed Two-line Great Primer Sans-serif in 1832. This display face contained only capitals and it is not clear from where the rather clumsy forms originated. It was around 1816 that the English type foundry of William Caslon IV released Two Lines English Egyptian.
![helvetica vs helvetica neue helvetica vs helvetica neue](http://www.identifont.com/samples2/adobe/Helvetica.gif)
Long before the first serif-less types for printing appeared, house painters and cartographers were painting and engraving sans serif numbers and letters. But is Helvetica really so good that it justifies its worldwide use on such a large scale? The typeface is even the subject of a new film, Helvetica (dir. It seemed to have come at the right time in the right place, and after it was renamed Helvetica in 1960 it quickly became even more ubiquitous, with a popularity it retains to this day. Fifty years ago Helvetica was released under the name Neue Haas Grotesk.