The personal computer has made a designer out of anyone who has ever created a birthday card, written a school project, or prepared a report for their boss. Choosing a typeface is key to making the finished product look good, and even 11-year-olds now chat knowingly about Times New Roman, Franklin Gothic and Garamond.
But is there enough interest in fonts to get audiences to watch a feature-length documentary about type — and one typeface in particular? New York filmmaker Gary Hustwit is finding out that there is.
Helvetica is his film marking the typeface's 50th anniversary. Created in Switzerland in 1957 and now used everywhere on the planet, the Helvetica font features simple clean letters where all strokes have even thicknesses. It is a sans-serif type, meaning there are none of the small flourishes (called serifs) that traditionally appeared on typefaces before the 19th century.
Hustwit's film has already been shown to sold-out audiences in Austin, Dallas, Zurich, Prague, Istanbul, New York, Providence and Boston. It will get its Canadian debut at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto on Saturday. It's also set to screen at the Logo Cities symposium at Concordia University in Montreal on May 5, and will be shown in Calgary later that month.
Excited word of mouth has graphic designers snapping up tickets, but about half of the audiences is made up of non-designers who are keenly interested in visual culture and its impact on modern life, Hustwit said.
With so many people now able to choose specific typefaces for their own projects, “they want to know more,” Hustwit said in a telephone interview from New York, where he is in the midst of a spate of East Coast showings of the film.
“They're interested in fonts and why a certain font looks classy and why one looks edgy and why one looks businesslike.”
Young people who have lived their whole lives on computers are particularly plugged into typography, he noted, and that's a huge revolution from 20 years ago when choosing type was restricted to professionals. “The kids with MySpace pages care about the graphic representation of themselves, as much as they care about the clothes they wear,” he said.
In the film, Hustwit focuses on the personalities of several modern designers, who reveal themselves as charming, articulate and analytical, and are sometimes refreshingly self-deprecating about their fixation with typography.
“The film is about the designers more than it is about Helvetica,” Hustwit said. “The typeface provides a structure to talk to these incredible artists who really design everything that we see all day long, from signs and advertisements to television graphics to magazine covers.” While their names are unknown to the public, their work is everywhere. “They are brilliant people, [but] they do what they do so well that they're invisible.”
His message to the audience: “Look around, look at the thousands of words that you see everyday. Do you think about them? Do you think about who made those letters and why the designer picked those certain letters for those signs or that advertisement? Typefaces are a subtle form of manipulation, and can be very political, and I think it's important that people realize that, and notice it.”
The film traces Helvetica from its roots in the modernist movement of the 1950s. Originally called Neue Haas Grotesk, it was renamed Helvetica (the Latin name for Switzerland) in the early 1960s, just as Swiss design was becoming wildly popular.
It was picked up by corporations (Lufthansa, BASF, BMW and dozens of others) as a clean type ideal for their logos, and was embraced in North America just as the modernist “international style” of architecture was sweeping the continent. One of Helvetica's appealing features was its apparent neutrality, along with its geometric, engineered look. Many designers liked that the words themselves were pre-eminent, not the typeface itself.
