December 13, 2008: Helvetica
I consider myself to enjoy documentaries in general, but at the end of them, I often find myself wondering whether I’ve taken the most efficient path to learning about something. It’s a similar feeling to what I get after rare occasions of watching the news on television, realizing that I could have read the exact same content in text form online in a matter of minutes, and the images are rarely compelling enough to make it worth the extra time spent. So it’s a rare documentary feature that leaves me feeling fulfilled, and the cause of that fulfillment is usually either the importance of historical images or footage to the story, or the emotional depth of interviews and testimonials which cannot be conveyed with the written word. Man on Wire is a documentary about an illegal tightrope crossing between the World Trade Center towers in New York City in the 1970s, which is getting a lot of attention because of the amazing wealth of historical footage showing the players at the time, layered on top of the opportunity to revisit these people in present-day interviews. Helvetica lacks that direct look at the interviewees in earlier decades, but captures their emotions in the present day, and presents us with the images from years past to which they refer. This is all cut together at a pace totally suited to the documentary feature format.
Helvetica is a documentary which discusses typefaces in general, and the (apparently) ubiquitous Helvetica in particular. It should be noted that a “typeface” is the name given to a particular set of designs for letters and characters, such as Helvetica, Arial or Courier, while a “font” refers to a particular style within that design, such as bold or italic. Font also used to refer to a specific size, but that usage is less important in the current days of smoothly scalable computer-generated copy. In the documentary, graphic designers, including typeface designers, sit in their bright studios and discuss the influence of Helvetica througout the decades since its rise to prominence in the early 1960s, and their gushing over the design perfection of Helvetica is presented against a backdrop of countless examples of corporate logos and municipal signage making use of the design, sometimes altering it substantially but always retaining the familiar look.
I’ve been exposed to desktop publishing and fonts for over 20 years, having used Macintosh computers in their early days for school work, so I’m familiar with some common typefaces and what they look like. Throughout this documentary, I was amazed at how prevalent Helvetica is in signage and logos, and how versatile it is, being seamlessly integrated into these corporate logos, tweaked in ways which emphasize the virtues of the companies and presented boldly in their signature colours.
I don’t have a great design sense and I’m certainly not as obsessive about it as these designers, but to see so many people, discussing the rise and fall and eventual resurrection of this typeface so passionately, really delivered the message that this is a subtle yet very important detail about how we perceive the world. When it came on the scene in the 1960s, Helvetica was viewed as a modern, clean, no nonsense sans-serif typeface, but after a decade or two there was a backlash as it appeared to be too conservative and stodgy. However, people keep coming back to it because it’s so versatile and readable, and clean sensible type never really goes out of fashion.
For anyone who is interested in the written word and its impact, particularly in the world at large and in branding/advertising areas, Helvetica is a fascinating look into the world behind the world we usually see.
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