Flak Magazine: Review of Helvetica, 06.xx.07

Like everyone, I had favorite fonts, but I only thought about them when I was using them. I never thought about typography outside of desktop publishing and the letterpress studio. But while taking the class, typefaces began to have stories. They weren't just arbitrary ways of hammering out the alphabet — these were carefully constructed drawings fashioned by passionate men and women who were driven by cultural ideals. I would walk down the street identifying every typeface I recognized: "That's Garamond," and "That's Bodoni," and, "That's Futura." And always, always, always, "That's Helvetica."

Helvetica is the most omnipresent of all typefaces and it turns 50 years old this year. It is so common in the urban environment that one designer has likened it to air. You see it in the logos for American Airlines, Sears, Lufthansa, 3M, Greyhound, Nestle, The North Face, Target and Tupperware. The US Postal Service uses it on their letterboxes and you can find it on your tax forms from the IRS. It is the official typeface for the Chicago Transit Authority and many other metro systems. It's on the posters for the movie Trainspotting and the stickers on Dole fruit.

Thus comes Helvetica, a film devoted to "the typeface of the 20th century." Director and producer Gary Hustwit has assembled a documentary that is history lesson, critique and love letter. It balances interviews of today's most respected graphic designers with countless shots of Helvetica in the wild — scenes of street signs, advertisements, store windows, posters and all manner of printed ephemera. Helvetica reveals its namesake across the globe, bold and delicate, freshly painted and filthy, obvious and obscure. Much of the film becomes a collage of examples revealing the beautiful and homely potentials for the font. For every person who loves Helvetica there is a striking, fresh billboard; for every person who hates Helvetica there is a peeling vinyl letter, flapping in the wind.

The film asks why Helvetica was so successful as opposed to another sans serif of its day, and no one can explain it aside from saying "Helvetica is perfect." (Except for the haters who say, "Helvetica is ugly, evil, and expressionless.") One designer points out that Helvetica appears to have been designed with only the negative space in mind — a very Swiss modernist way of thinking. Because of this, the letters flow with a natural rhythm. Helvetica, too, is a near perfect blend of human and machine. It's a grotesque sans, so its design is based more in "what looks right" than mathematical precision — which is not to say there is no math in Helvetica, but it's not like Futura, which is beautiful but too geometric to take over the world. Other typefaces, like Gill Sans or Franklin Gothic aim for similar goals as Helvetica, but miss the typographic patterns Helvetica creates. Helvetica's man-made feel, combined with its modernist, almost mechanical simplicity, provide the font's reputation of being the ultimate sans serif.

The film also unfolds the history of modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern graphic design through Helvetica's lens. In the '50s and '60s, modernists rejoiced in the font as a clean, clear set of letters to arrange and load with context. Helvetica's advent eliminated the era's hand-lettered look and ushered in a new age of simplicity and directness. Years later, postmodernists would recoil at the sight of the Helvetica, associating it with the corporate world and a corrupt government. They wanted an organic, illustrative look — something Helvetica would not provide. Today, the po-pomo set has re-embraced Helvetica and breathed new life into the tried-and-true sans serif. By narrating this pendulum swing of generational patterns — Generation 2 rebels against Generation 1's ideals; Generation 3 rebels against Generation 2's ideals and in doing so, discover and reinvent Generation 1's ideas as their own — Helvetica the film does what the best history texts do: It takes a very specific element of a culture and uses it as a vehicle for understanding that culture's universals. The micro reveals the macro.

Helvetica is receiving a limited run in theaters on the arthouse circuit. Because of this, most of the audience at the movie's screenings are designers and typophiles. This makes for an interesting movie-watching crowd. Would any other audience laugh when designer Michael Bierut pounds his finger on a Coca-Cola magazine ad? Would any other audience audibly gasp when Herman Zapf (the creator of Palatino, Optima, Zapfino and, yes, Zapf Dingbats) appears on the screen? After the showing I attended, everyone around me was talking about message and clarity, letterform and space, ubiquity and beauty. It was a curious moment to be a fly on the wall.

I took the Chicago "L" home from the theater and Helvetica greeted me at the station, on signs in the train car, on the laundromat I passed during the train ride. The world was still type-rich and Helvetica-ridden. But Helvetica was more than a name, a story and a series of little drawings. It was passions, revulsions, archetypes and finality. It was a square period of modernist faith, a corporate box to break away from and a simple ingredient with which to begin a new epoch. Helvetica the film added new layers to the richness of the typographic landscape. The world hadn't changed, but it was deliciously charged.

— Benjamin Chandler (blchandler at sbcglobal dot net)