There were a lot of designers interviewed who all said something to the tune of, “Helvetica, as monumentally successful as it is, cannot express the true meanings and implications of some messages. For these messages it is better to use hand-done, custom fonts.” I am very happy to hear this from people who live and breathe graphic designer. For these titans of the industry to admit that there needs to be an evolution in the way that text is represented fills me with a selfish kind of excitement for my own potential within the industry.
Though much of my training in designing letters was…unorthodox…I still feel that I have been designing letters for so long that I must have picked up on more than a few of the basic principles of graphically designing typography. Not only this, but I feel that I can bring something new to the world of typography if I work hard enough on it.
I have been creating custom fonts for many years now, and in my experience I, like many of the designers who were interviewed, see that there is a sort of stagnation in the popular graphic styles of linguistic representation across media platforms. While Helvetica has become totally unavoidable in our everyday life, I agree with the opinion of Sagmeister and Carson when they said that we must move beyond this culturally persistent obsession with the font.
We are in need of development on a massive scale with psychological and physiological research to back it up. What exactly is it that people like about certain fonts? Is there a replicable method to produce an emotion in a viewer through typeface? These are the questions that I wish to answer in my career and I’m very happy to have the support of some of the most important names in graphic design.
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