sans-serif Neue Haas Grotesk
Progenitor of the beloved Helvetica font, and thus the culprit responsible for weird iterations of memes - Mike Parker - died last Sunday at the ripe old age of 85. He has been described as "the font god," which to be fair, is probably an accurate description for the guy who helped bring Helvetica to the world. However, he is also credited with the development of over 1,100 typefaces.
Parker was around through it all, having been born in London in 1929
Mergenthaler Linotype Company beginning in 1959, he created the sans-serif Neue Haas Grotesk typeface, which, as it turned out, did not play well with the industry standard metal typesetting machine. Looking for a solution, Parker and co. reworked Neue Haas Grotesk, which eventually became the font with a surprisingly large t-shirt presence on the internet.
Aside from his life's work leading up to a create-your-own Helvetica t-shirt website run by a dude named Chico, Parker developed Pages Software, which was a word processor on Steve Jobs' NeXT platform. Now, Apple's official word processor is called Pages. Parker also founded Bitstream, the first (though unfortunately now defunct) digital typeface company.