How Helvetica Got Its Name
It launched in 1957 as Neue Haas Grotesk. A German licensing deal turned it into the Latin word for Switzerland.
In 1957, Eduard Hoffmann, director of the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei in Münchenstein, Switzerland, asked his freelance draftsman Max Miedinger to redraw an old sans-serif called Haas Grotesk. The brief was modest: tighten the letters and modernize them for the postwar Swiss market. The result was released as Neue Haas Grotesk.
The name was a problem. Haas's German parent company, Stempel, wanted to license the typeface but worried that German customers would resist a font with "Haas" in the name. In 1960 they proposed Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland. Hoffmann objected — that was already a brand of insurance and condensed milk — and countered with Helvetica, the adjective form. It stuck.
Linotype picked it up next, cutting matrices for hot-metal machines around the world. By the mid-1960s the typeface had escaped its origin: Lufthansa adopted it, the New York subway commissioned it in 1970 through Unimark, and eventually Apple shipped it on the iPhone. Miedinger died in 1980, never wealthy from the work; he had been paid as a freelancer with no royalty agreement.
The name is the giveaway. Most typefaces are named for designers, cities, or whims. Helvetica is named for a country, in a dead language, because the marketing department in Frankfurt did not trust the word "Swiss."
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