Helvetica

This is an 80 minute long movie about a font. People talk about the font, the history, the meaning and the significance of helvetica. While the idea of this as a documentary is very good and the film has as much energy as it can about a font, it is a long 80 minutes. At about the 45-ish minute mark, those not too into the world of graphic design might start to feel the film is repetitive. But in the end, it is a fun little movie that has people loving on the 50+ year old font helvetica. If that is your idea of a good time, you'll love this. If you say to yourself, "80 minutes about a typeface?" - this movie may not be for you.

This movie is brilliant. It's a documentary about the creation of the Helvetica font, sure. But it's also: a musing on the history of modern graphic design. A diatribe (by some) about a font seen as style-killingly ubiquitous. A visit to favorite graphic designs of years past. A reflection about what our fonts say about us.

If you are a graphic designer, you'll love it. If you live with a graphic designer, you'll shake your head and say, "Yup" in recognition. If you don't pay any attention to graphic design, you may think about it just a tiny bit more after seeing this movie. And you will definitely come out of it with SOME opinion about the Helvetica font.

This is surely the best documentary I have seen. I use several metrics in this.

A film is almost without exception a story. A documentary is usually presumed to be a found story, an existing one that the filmmaker merely exposes. We come to the thing expecting some coherent story, already formed, the problem having two threads: Can we trust the filmmaker? Does the story resonate? Often a solid position in one mitigates the other.

But real life — at least the life I know — has no stories that are blunt. Real stories, the ones that weave themselves through the world, are rich, only somewhat visible, immensely intriguing and often educational. I expect to be puzzled. If there are "two sides," I immediately mistrust the teller, because true movement is simply itself.

This film should be celebrated simply because it decides to present a story in its unformed state. We hear from designers young and old, clever and not. Some are geniuses and some see the genius of design and we have no idea which is which. They report profoundly different views on a typeface. Lest we think this is an irrelevant subject, the observations on the typeface are bridged by examples to show how thoroughly it has saturated.

So we are left with the same form as "Ten Tiny Love Stories," perspectives that surround the notion and instead of pulling out the answer, illuminated the mystery. The simple fact is that this is a powerful, mysterious force that makes us do things. The comparison of font design and romance is not misplaced: both somehow relate to the bricks of stories we use in constructing a life — or for some of us a fort to protect from life.

So I can recommend this to you. I recommend seeing it with your partner, your real partner. And then sit with them quietly and reflect on the nature of clarity and knowing.

I can criticize this though. There is much that could easily have been said that wasn't.

Its usually presumed that spoken language is quite old and written language a relatively modern technology compromised to make it persist. In this context, type design is merely a matter of style, a choice.

But there is evidence that spoken language predates modern humans and evolved over time through collaborative toolmaking, most particularly weaving and stonechipping. Acts of hands. Shapes -- physical form, with symmetries. Spoken language in this history is itself an adaptation, and written language perhaps closer to the core of how we think. In this history, shapes matter. The process of creating form in story — all manner of form — matters. The story is how the story is shaped.

We bump against this intuitively. It was why the Macintosh was a giant step forward in the 80's, because storytellers could for the first time be storyshapers (publishers, in the corporate lexicon). And why Microsoft is such an evil. And why type design elements have become so deeply viral. The original features come from carved inscriptions and independently from monks' pens.

Anyway, from that Mac beginning came a focus on type as never before. And several design journals that struggled with the issues spoken about in this film. Pulling them out of print to put on screen should carry some more weight than we have here. I am hoping that some truly talented filmmaker is inspired by this.

The most edgy but still intelligent design and font design journal from the last decades is "Emigre," which you should peruse if this movie intrigues you. Also you might want to check out Darius, who was behind the first designed font.

My typeface is Vendetta.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

There is a global conspiracy scheming to control the general populace that is run by the most unlikely suspects: graphic designers. Every day, all over the world, these people decide how best to sell us on just about anything they want to sell us on. Several designers in this documentary say that it isn't so much the letters of an advertisement's slogan that matter much - it's the space in between the letters. What's so important about the empty space? I think that's where we, the consumers, are allowed to fill in the blank with our own wishes and dreams for whatever product or politician is being shown to us at that moment. But that's not really what this movie is about.

Helvetica is the most commonly used typeface in the modern world. Crate & Barrel, Target, American Airlines, and Energizer are some of the more notable companies that use Helvetica and its derivatives in their corporate logos. Countless other businesses have used it in their advertising. The reason for this is that it was designed for the specific purpose of being as universally acceptable as possible. It is not exactly stylish in and of itself, though many designers have used it stylishly because the typeface is merely a tool of the designer. They can make it stick out or blend in to their liking, and these seem to be the two main schools of thought over the use of Helvetica. The old school designers like it for its simplicity and boldness where newer, younger designers mostly see it as a generic relic from the 60's. One man who calls Helvetica a symbol of conformity and socialism apparently doesn't understand the irony of his using a MacBook at the same time he states this.

This film is focused on the Helvetica typeface - its creation, its purpose, and its uses - but it speaks volumes about the design/advertising industry as a whole. There are thousands of people who are striving everyday to make the average Citizen Schmoe feel a certain way and think a certain thing, to control and exploit our buying and behavioral patterns. They may not all be shilling Tide, but it is alarming to see inside that culture. Like any trend in the art world, Helvetica has gone through ups and downs. It was designed in the 50's as an answer to the kitschy, colorful designs of the era. It was meant to be powerful and grounding, not light and airy. It was used heavily throughout the 60's, but the designers got tired of it and abandoned Helvetica's straight lines for "grungy" design in the 80's and 90's. Since Helvetica was built to have almost no personality, designers started giving their work more of that with handwritten text and goofy designs which would have been considered printing accidents in decades past. In fact, one man actually received praise for a mistake that was made in publishing. So the new designers of the 90's were going wild, the older men shook their heads, and our current generation of designers were learning how to use Helvetica in wild ways. The lifespan of the font has come, gone, and come again, much like leg warmers are bound to someday soon.

The reason Helvetica is still being used today is because it works. People see those solid, strong letters and they instantly feel secure in the idea it's portraying and comforted by its mere presence, which makes it "ideal" to some people for use as public signs labeling streets, restrooms, subways, etc. It's mind control in a font. It's pretty fascinating stuff, to be sure. But be careful out there, readers. Next time you have to choose between Mobil and Arco gas stations, just remember they're both using the safety of Helvetica to lure you in. And then make the decision to go electric.

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Helvetica screened this week at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX where it was very well-received. In a million years it would never have occurred to me to do a documentary on a type font. The film makers somehow came up with the idea of doing a cultural history of the Helvetica font which has become the almost universal default modern font over the past 50 years. Fonts are almost like the air we breathe. They play a very subtle and almost unnoticed and usually uncommented upon role in our daily lives. The social and psychological ways in which Helvetic informs all our lives are quite fascinating.

Helvetica is a humorous film that combines a series of interview clips with a variety of often rather quirky graphic font designers with shot of various street signs and corporate logos. The film provides a great deal of insight into the role of the Helvetica font in shaping Western culture. Helvetica is both entertaining and informative in that it provides great insight into a ubiquitous aspect of modernity about which most of us are completely oblivious. I hope that many people get the opportunity to see this unusual and insightful film, because it opens a fascinating window for better understanding our society. Since versions of Helvetica are also the default font on most computers, many of us type in Helvetica constantly without even realizing it.

As I walked home from the film, I couldn't help noticing that many of the street signs in Austin appeared to be in Helvetica.