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.
Helvetica director Gary Hustwit. (Brigid Hughes/Swiss Dots)
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.
Helvetica was widely used throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and was the most popular typeface sold in the Letraset type transfer system. But its use in printed documents exploded in the late 1980s when it became one of the default settings on the first generation of Macintosh computers.
With its inclusion in Mac-based word processing, Helvetica gained “iconic status as the first face of the digital office era,” says David Michaelides, who runs the design bookstore Swipe in downtown Toronto. “It suddenly became the pre-eminent face for bland corporate communications.”
In the late eighties and early nineties, “virtually every piece of home-cooked corporate communications was in Helvetica,” said Michaelides. That prompted a backlash against the typeface, although designers now look more favourably on Helvetica, at least when it is used with restraint.
Hustwit started thinking about making a documentary about graphic design a couple of years ago, then focused on Helvetica when he became aware that its 50th anniversary was approaching, and after reading Lars Muller's seminal 2002 book Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface.
The idea was to explore the visual landscape of cities, using Helvetica as the reference point, he said. The fact that the designers he interviewed ended up being smart, funny and passionate meant that “all I had to do is press ‘record' on the camera and let them go.”
Hustwit financed most of the documentary himself — he won't say exactly how much it cost, only that it was well into six figures and likely “was the most expensive graphic design film ever made.”
The biggest outside investor was Calgary design firm Veer Inc., which gave almost $100,000 to the production.
The intent was to help enlighten the public about design said Jon Parker, Veer's director of brand communication.
Parker admitted surprise, however, that the film has caught the attention of the public. But he loves the way it portrays designers. “People outside the industry will just be so amazed that there are people so passionate about type.”
Hustwit said the greatest compliment he has received is when audience members tell him they now see the world in a different way.
“It's like a disease,” he said. “When you start noticing the type all around you, it's hard to stop noticing it.”
A tale of two fonts
Nothing gets graphic designers quite so worked up as a debate about the merits of the typeface Arial, a Helvetica look-alike that was has been widely distributed with Microsoft Windows software since the early 1990s.
Legend has it that Microsoft didn't want to pay a licence fee for Helvetica, so it created Arial to take its place. It's very similar — although not identical — to Helvetica, and it has exactly the same proportions and widths so it can be substituted easily for the older typeface.
Mark Simonson wrote an essay called The Scourge of Arial on his website www.ms-studio.com/articles.html where he describes the typeface as a “shameless imposter” with a “rather dubious history and not much character.” One problem, says the Minneapolis, Minn., designer, is that Arial has become a standard font for non-professionals and it is vastly overused.
Toronto design journalist and accessibility consultant Joe Clark calls Arial a “hideous abomination,” although he reluctantly concedes that one of its derivations, Arial Rounded, is “quite nice” and Arial Black is “not bad.”
One thing that Arial has achieved is that it has taken over the mantle as the “default font,” thus freeing professional designers to embrace Helvetica once again.
Richard Blackwell
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