Font information

designer	Linotype staff
year	1900
publisher	Linotype
where to buy	Linotype Fonts.com MyFonts.com

Notes

Hel­vetica descends from an old line of sans serif fonts known as grotesques. (Not because they were hor­ri­bly ugly — like many things in typog­ra­phy, the funny name just stuck.) Basic Com­mer­cial is a grotesque from the early 1900s that comes across as a rough-hewn ver­sion of Hel­vetica. One pop­u­lar urban leg­end holds that New York City sub­way sig­nage has always been in Hel­vetica. Not so — Basic Com­mer­cial was the main sub­way font for many years, though it’s now been replaced with Hel­vetica. (An admirably thor­ough AIGA arti­cle reviews the his­tory.) This is an excel­lent and under­used font.