Exploring Creativity and Technology

Yes, a movie about a font. No, it’s not an action-adventure about typefaces saving the world, however, it is a documentary by Gary Hustwit about how the font Helvetica changed the world – and continues to affect design choices that impact how we interact with society and culture. I’ve been strangely addicted to this film ever since downloading it to my iPod last week. Don’t know if it’s the sense of design that permeates the cinematography, or the cool, understated electronic/ambient soundtrack, or just that fact that I’ve never seen a film so purely about graphic design. Being a designer myself, it was incredible to see some of the most famous desingers from every era, including Neville Brody, Stefan Sagmeister, David Carson and Paula Scher. All of these designers I studied back-in-the-day during college. Especially Carson – I loved his Ray Gun magazine and it’s complete revolution against design standards, which ushered in the grunge font era. I guess I cut my teeth in design during that era, and it was always controversial at the time among my professors and old-school designers. Carson mentions the issue where he replaced an entire article with Zapf Dingbats because he thought the article was poorly written and boring, so there was no need to read it anyway – and I remember passing that issue around in one of my design classes.

All of the interviews were well done and it was great to see the wide range of opinions on the use of Helvetica. The respect the older designers had for it, and how some of them only used variations of Helvetica in their work. The font was a bold step into the future, back in 1957, and many corporate logos made the switch to Helvetica at the time to clean up and focus their identity. By the seventies, some desingers associated Helvetica too much with corporate blandness and conformity, so the psychedelic and more experimental fonts were introduced. In the 80s, post-modernism and a further step away from Helvetica ensued, with more playfulness and expressiveness. By the 90s, deconstruction and total disregard of design rules led to the grunge era, where anything was possible. Now the pendulum is swinging back to clean and modern and helvetica is becoming respected once again.

Overall, I just found it awesome to get a window into the personalities of these great designers I had read so much about. And the interviews were separated nicely with clips of Helvetica in use on signage throughout the cities where the designers lived or worked. This film probably has a niche audience of designers and visual artists, so I’m not sure how interesting it would be for the general viewer. Though, as one of the type designers in the film points out, when he mentions what he does nowadays to a stranger, he often gets a story about a particular font the person must use at his office, etc. So in a sense the general public does have a stronger knowledge of and use for fonts than in the past when it was only the designer who had access to this. And with the proliferation of myspace and other social networking websites, many more people are experiencing being designers first-hand as they customize their sites. So maybe the film would prove interesting to a wider audience in this sense.

It definitely switched the graphic design portion of my brain into overdrive. Almost inspires me to dig up an old copy of Fontographer and start designing my own typefaces again.

Learn more about the film here: http://www.helveticafilm.com/, or search for it on iTunes.