jellystone or where the buffalos roam

Via the always engrossing Everlasting Blört, we discover that not only is the generic human symbol resigned to his tortured fate of slips, trips and falls and now hapless goring by bison whilst visiting national parks, he also has a nickname, Helvetica Man. The origins of this luckless pictogram pre-date the typeface’s foundry and was called so to invoke the font’s neutrality—ever stoic, even in the face of the gauntlet of Olympian contests and undaunted by any and all hazards, and suggests the Vitruvian Man or one of those prehistoric victims of an avalanche or tumbling into a tar pit, unfrozen or extracted ages later.