Michael Beirut gave one of my favorite quotes in the movie Helvetica. He was talking about the huge change Helvetica brought to corporate identity in the ’60s and what it must have felt like to go through that change: “That must seem like you would crawl through a desert with your mouth just caked with filthy dust and then someone’s offering you a clear, refreshing, distilled, icy glass of water to kind of clear away all this horrible burden of history.”
So I figured I’d enjoy reading the selections from his book, 79 Short Essays on Design. Each one is set in a different typeface to match its topic.
29. Vladimir Nabokov: Father of Hypertext
Here Beirut reflects on wasting an afternoon surfing the web (I think we’ve all done that) and after he returns to his weekend chore of putting away some books lying around, he picks up his copy of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. He describes Pale Fire as proto-hypertext because of the way the footnotes lead you around the book like hypertext links. Apparently some computer nerds at IBM even briefly proposed using it to test an early hypertext-like system in 1969.
This one really brought me full circle, because it reminded me of my second blog post for this class on Stitch Bitch by Shelley Jackson. I had written there about a book I fell in love with when I was 16, called House of Leaves, that is similarly structured to Pale Fire, with some crazy layouts thrown in.
45. Mr. Vignelli’s Map
In 1972, Massimo Vignelli designed a map for the New York City subway that, when necessary, chose design over geography. The result was this map that is often thought of as incomprehensible, but Beirut disagrees. He says it was his favorite souvenir from his first trip to New York in 1976 and describes it as “gorgeous, iconic and cerebral.” 
I wasn’t sure exactly what Vignelli’s map looked like; I’m only a little familiar with the current version that replaced Vignelli’s in 1979, so I decided to look at it. And I think I agree with Beirut. But I’ve also never had to try and navigate the NYC subway system.
46. I Hate ITC Garamond
“The most distinctive element of the typeface is its enormous lower-case x-height. In theory this improves its legibility, but only in the same way that dog poop’s creamy consistency in theory should make it more edible.”
Beirut is good at metaphors. I like this essay because it tells me that it can sometimes be okay to hate something just because. Beirut lists a few reasons ITC Garamond is bad: it’s dated, it doesn’t deserve the Garamond name, its x-height is exaggerated, the letter-spacing is too tight. But he says he just really dislikes it for some reason that isn’t listable. Maybe it’s the combination of it all.
I hate ITC Garamond, too. Just look at it for a minute and compare it to some of the other Garamond derivatives. In the words of Snoopy, bleah.
Beirut also makes a good point: that he can usually find a saving grace in a typeface he doesn’t like.
This essay reminded me of that page at the end of all the Harry Potter books, with the diamond-shaped paragraph, that tells you the text was set in Adobe Garamond (as so many books are). I always read that page in every book, even though it said the same thing in all of them (except book 5 where the size is reduced to 11.5-point from 12-point!), because I liked it for some reason.
65. I am a Plagiarist
The part about Hellen Keller is my favorite part of this essay: “…when I wrote a letter, even to my mother, I was seized with a sudden feeling, and I would spell the sentences over and over, to make sure that I had not read them in a book.”
Beirut discusses the subjective nature of plagiarism and how it can be difficult to know if your idea is really your idea or just some faintly recalled memory of that thing you saw that one time. I think it’s really important to realize this, because we all derive inspiration from the worlds in which we live, and it’s not possible to be completely and absolutely original. And that it’s okay.