Hilti: Hans Eduard Meier

If asked, what’s your favorite logo (not your own) I’d immediately say, Hilti.

Of course, you couldn’t ask for a better word to make a logo from. HILTI.

“I mean, five vertical caps, with that L/T combination!”

Today I would try to space out the H/I/L, but probably would think better of it and go back to the equal white channel everywhere. And look at that L/T kern! It doesn’t get better than that.

This is the work of Hans Eduard Meier (1922-2014), known to type buffs as the designer of Syntax (1955), perhaps the first san serif explicitly called a humanist sans. 

His friend and colleague, Erich Alb, gave a sweet appreciation of Meier at ATypI in Saõ Paulo last year, with a number of images of lettering and type, which can be seen in HD on YouTube. Yves Peters wrote an assessment of Meier, on FontFeed.

Alb showed a great application of the Hilti logo—a poster with the logo in orbit around the globe. The perspective was drawn by hand—pen ink, he said. Clearly a lettering master of the old school.

A poster for Hilti (which makes construction products and tools. [Courtesy Erich Alb]

Meier was also an early adopter of the computer for type design. Twenty-five years after the first weights of Syntax were designed, Linotype releasedSyntax Serif (2000), and soon thereafter Syntax Letter for business correspondence, and an eccentric display based on Greek letters, Syntax Lapidar.

But for me, if you say Hans Eduard Meier, I think, “Hilti.”