Typeface Design for Lineto

A brewery closes, its typeface vanishes — then comes back twice

LL Brauer revives the defunct corporate typeface of Zürich's Hürlimann brewery, originally drawn by Pierre Miedinger — a nephew of Helvetica designer Max Miedinger — in 1974. When the brewery was acquired by Carlsberg and shut down in 1997, the typeface disappeared with it. Elektrosmog revived it in 1999 for an arts festival on the former brewery site, reworking Miedinger's original ink drawings with his permission to produce a proper headline font. Additional weights followed in 2006 and later; font engineering was by Alphabet, Berlin. The full six-weight family with italics was published by Lineto in 2019. In 2017 the revived Hürlimann brand adopted LL Brauer to reconnect with its 1970s visual identity.

Set in LL Brauer

Insights

The original glyph set was minimal — designed for brand applications — requiring substantial extension before it could function as a headline font.
The 1999 revival was occasion-driven: created specifically for a festival on the closed brewery's premises, not as a speculative commercial release.
Development unfolded in stages over 20 years: Desarzens collaboration in 2006, further weights by Walser for a US mass-market magazine, then final character-set extension and formal revisions before the six-weight family released in 2019.
Phased-out Hürlimann brand logos were included as a bonus glyph set, preserving artefacts of the original corporate design system.