Anyway, so last night we watched “Helvetica“. No, it’s not a fantasy movie about Zena’s lost sister or a Roman war movie with Brad Pitt. It’s a documentary about a font. My quote for this movie is “if you know what helvetica is, you’ll probably be into this movie.”
I give Scott a hard time about his geek stuff he reads. This is designers’-geeking.
Plain and simple, the font “Helvetica” is one of the most commonly used fonts in the last couple of decades. Even if you don’t recognize fonts/typefaces, you’d recognize Helvetica. As this film points out visually, it’s EVERYWHERE.
Apparently there is this love/hate thing with Helvetica in the world of designers. From it’s creation, it was in a revolution of design post-WWII into the modern world. Clean, crisp, sanserif design with lots of white space. It’s creation and use and the modern design style itself were radical and changed the design world forever. From the pop-y joan-clever cartoon ads, we now had large glossy photos and simple text. Period.
The dilemma comes for those who are just tired of it and feel “helvetica” just disappears because it’s so common; and for those who feel like it’s time for change and diversity of font. But most agree there is this suspicious quality to Helvetica that does simply make it the “perfect font” that no one can improve upon.
Interestingly, like all modernism, we as a united world (minus treacherous dictators) left behind one dictatorship and actually in an attempt to become universal adopted another socialistic dictation of how art and design would be expressed. While I love modern art and design, it became very apparent how kind of odd this was. Although much of the design at the time came from Germans and Swiss who are admittedly by nature structured and rule-oriented. [I know this is a very simplistic recap of history, but I'm keeping things simple]
So anyway, I now appreciate typefaces much more. I also appreciate the perspectives of different “camps” of designers as they work to explore the world of creativity and dapple in blurring the lines that they are not supposed to cross. While anti-conformists, these designers all seemed on a quest to beautify, and while their styles and tastes differ, they’d be incredulous for just plain bad design.
So I’m going to take what I learned in “Helvetica” and reconsider my pursuits as a graphic designer; as a woman living in a post-modern world. [Or maybe a world that is not so post-modern as they'd like to think....there's another discussion].
