Thanks to “Helvetica,” I noticed the font on the sign to the restroom at University Grill, I noticed I’m always typing in Verdana, and I appreciated a joke about Comic Sans in a whole new way. I’m afraid the film has changed me forever.
I began the documentary assuming that during personal design choices, Helvetica is often going to be my safest option. And the first 20 minutes or so confirmed that for me. But as the documentary progressed, and cut from one shot to another of increasingly varying uses of Helvetica, I started to get…antsy. Helvetica suddenly represented conformity. I can’t help but want to reject something so widespread. And that’s pretty much when the film took a new direction for awhile, so I guess I fed right into the intended plot-line.
However, now that I’ve taken a step back from the documentary, one moment stands out (attached at the bottom of this post) that conveys the value of Helvetica. And that was when Michael Bierut had the chance to talk about Helvetica in a way I think he’d been waiting for all his life. Basically he used some really stellar similes to describe Helvetica’s sudden dominance in 1960s advertising and its affect on branding. For example, a company changing its ad campaign to incorporate Helvtica was like a person who washed grit from the desert from his or her teeth with a glass of water.
I still wonder though how timeless a font can be. Everything changes at least a little bit with time. Doesn’t it? Am I wrong about that? I suppose that’s a little bit of what “Helvetica” was trying to say when they described some of the other waves of influence typeface and design have gone through. For awhile nothing the creator of Helvetica knew about typeface was mainstream any longer. But also as the movie made clear, and as seemed to be its overarching theme, Helvetica has been and continues to be used regularly since it made its first appearance in the U.S.
Some things I wish they would have delved a bit deeper into though might help answer that. I’d like to know how popular the font is in Switzerland and other areas that use the Roman alphabet. I’d also like to have heard from more designers who helped brands choose fonts that aren’t Helvetica and what the reasoning behind their other choices were. One example wasn’t effective for me at demonstrating the effect of a font on messaging. As one of the designers pointed out, a designer using just one or two fonts her whole life would be like a writer using only one or two words. So where do the other fonts fit in? Why are they chosen?
Overall the documentary made me rethink the way I look at design and the importance of typeface in it, and that’s probably all it needed to do. But now I’d like a deeper look at other typefaces and the messages they send.