Helvetica Documentary…
Before watching this documentary, I was aware of the font and used it a few times, but didn’t realise the importance it held and has been used so often. But even after the first few minutes it became clear that the font is everywhere from street signs to advertising and it’s telling us things all the time. There are many typefaces, but Helvetica is the one we see everywhere. I found it particularly interesting that a seemingly simple, almost boring, typeface is considered so ‘timeless’ and perfect by so many experts. A line that stood out to me was when trying to evaluate Helvetica, it was like ‘trying to evaluate off white paint’, as it shows that even the experts find it hard to explain.
Throughout the documentary, a number of graphic designers and writers speak about how design is how companies reach us and show us what they consider to be exclusive. Massimo Vignelli, who created the New York City Transit Signage, spoke out about how it is his role is to ‘cure the visual disease’ and that ‘typography is white, it is the space between the black’. I found this a very interesting way to relook at typography as it is always the font we see first, but when you look at it from this perspective, the design is made from the spaces within each letter. It was described in a way relating to music, how it’s the space between the notes that make the music, like the space between the letters make the word. This stood out to me, as in UI/UX design we are told that negative space is a design tool, and this puts it into perspective.
The history of Helvetica is quite a turbulent one. It moved from a typeface that everyone used that can be applied to all areas of commercial information to being regarded as a ‘dull blanket of sameness’ as it was associated with endless faceless things. Two designers who wanted to break away from this typeface and the International Typographic Style which it stood for are Jonathan Hoefler and Paula Schler. Paula Scher is a prime example of how people wanted to fight against the font as she felt it quite repressive. I found this interesting as I didn’t think such a popular typeface could become so used that it became unpopular. But this resulted in an almost limbo time until the 1990s when Helvetica came back into popularity, but with a modern twist, shown through the work of Erwin Brinkers, Marieke Stolk and Danny van den Dungen. I particularly liked how they combined modernism with Helvetica which highlighted how modernism can be more subversive. They didn’t agree with the idea of globalism that had become associated with the typeface.
Overall, I found this documentary very informative about how important font and typography is as a way of communication and how we become so used to having it around us, that we might not notice how clever they are. Helvetica is a prime example of this as people keep saying how they want to improve the typeface but never really can. A message that I found most of the designers were trying to put across was that you don’t know how good Helvetica is until you work with it.