Each day we are bombarded with messages, from the time we wake up in the morning, throughout our daily routines, on the street, in the car, at home with our families, in the grocery store, and by then end of the night, our message consumption is at max capacity, until it all begins again when the alarm clock sounds the next morning. If other people are remotely similar to me, I know they pass through their lives seeing, hearing, and consuming these messages without much thought. I personally may spend a moment or two to understand the over-arching theme, but there are few things that call my attention strongly enough so that I actually pause to understand the components of a message.
This used to be true. Before I ever studied journalism, I was a passive bystander, being force-fed shitty leftovers whichever news outlet I chose for the day. Now, I can barely stomach an entire news cast before I am ready to throw in the towel. This was also true prior to studying receiving a film degree. I used to be just another patron eating her popcorn and chewing her JuJu Beans, but now each scene passes on the screen and there is a uncontrollable and subconscious level of analysis I cannot escape. The lighting, the dialogue, the lack of dialogue, the camera angles, and the list continues.
I thought I had exerted all my quirky analyses capabilities, until about a month ago it dawned on me that it was happening again. This time it wasn’t even film or television based, but rather in ways I hadn’t even known possible– website design, site usability, target audiences, css, html, graphic design, what is art, and now typography.
Typography? That’s what I was thinking until watching Helvetica– thanks a lot, Motley. But as I was watching these older men talk so extensively and so excitedly about type, I couldn’t help but wonder what this is all about. Throughout this week’s assignments of creating our own typeface and defining our own alien bios, I began to get a sense of the importance type can have on your work, your client, and the way you represent yourself. It wasn’t until I after I defined my “alien” that I realized the valuable lesson woven into this … unorthodox?… assignment. If you can identify and define who you are representing, creating symbols (or type) is that much easier. You begin to represent your subject in ways you never knew possible.
So back to me and Helvetica on a Sunday night. I am listening to these older gentlemen talk about their careers work of creating this typeface, that to my surprise is nearly ever message I consume throughout my day. Yet to them, it isn’t just type, or even black symbols on a page. To them, type is the white space on the page. Type is the perfectly designed matrix that locks in the black marks to tightly they cannot move, only exist in their given space. Type is all about the cuts outs and the line weight, and they way the spaces meaning to the black marks we read. And so now to my point, just like news and film, I can’t read anymore. Instead I catch myself staring at the spaces between the markings.
Now that I no longer can read, I had plenty time to ponder the video. I got to thinking about what the type designer in Helvetica was saying, about how type shouldn’t say anything, but rather just exist to be understood. In that theory, I think Helvetica probably is the most neutral of typefaces– like the designer says, through letter weight you can say everything you need to say, but the type itself is always legible. This is not the traditional take on the subject I would have expected from a designer– usually they are the creative ones with bogus ideas on how everything means something. Yet when the documentary began showing all the different ways Helvetica is used in advertising, street signs, formally and informally, it proved their point. The type is legible and clear to understand, yet prior to watching this film I would not have grouped them all as the same family. Instead I would have associated the given type example with its respective business or meaning. It is an interesting notion when you consider the different aspects of design, and furthermore the various motivations that inspire that design. Just as I had to realize, that there is more than one way to report, or more than one way to film, there too, is more than one way to design type. And within each of these choices, there is significant meaning, significant process, and significant thought that are found somewhere in those white spaces between the characters. We may never see what is in the spaces, but when we do, we may never be able to see just white again.