Helvetica Spent Its First Three Years With a Different Name

Eduard Hoffmann, who ran the Haas type foundry in Munchenstein outside Basel, wanted a sans-serif clean enough to compete with the German workhorse Akzidenz-Grotesk. He hired Max Miedinger, a former Haas salesman who had gone freelance, to draw it. The two of them spent 1956 sketching, and the foundry released the result in 1957 under a humble name: Neue Haas Grotesk. New Haas Grotesque.

The German connection is what changed everything. Haas's parent foundry, Stempel, was owned by Linotype, and Linotype wanted to sell the typeface worldwide. "Neue Haas Grotesk" did not move metal in New York. So in 1960 Stempel rechristened it Helvetica, after Helvetia, the Latin name the Romans used for the Alpine tribes who lived in what is now Switzerland.

The rebrand worked. Within a decade Helvetica was on American Airlines planes, Lufthansa schedules, and BMW brochures. The U.S. federal income tax forms picked it up. Apple shipped it on the original Macintosh in 1984. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority converted New York subway signage to Helvetica in 1989, replacing a chaotic mix of typefaces with a single voice.

What Miedinger and Hoffmann actually drew was modest: a sans-serif with a tall x-height, terminals cut on horizontal or vertical lines, and unusually tight spacing. What it became is the closest thing twentieth-century design has to a default. The typeface that conquered the airports and the tax codes still answers, technically, to a name a Roman general would have recognized.