
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.