helvetica

...or the geekiest movie you'd never thought you wanted to see. [but you should - and won't be disappointed]

...of course, [geeky?] i thoroughly enjoyed it.

this documentary celebrates the 50th year of the face font of post WWII, post-modernism by interviewing nominal figures of design - Erik Spiekermann, Matthew Carter**, Massimo Vignelli, Wim Crouwel, Hermann Zapf, Neville Brody, Stefan Sagmeister, Michael Bierut, David Carson, Paula Scher, Jonathan Hoefler - and others.

this homage to graphic art and print draws the uninitiated into a world to which none of us are immune, but probably few of us are attuned...we wander the aisles of grocer's adverts...interstates...and public buildings daily without even considering - perhaps - the vehicle of information dissemination...or contemplating the impact of visual culture.

i liked especially the venture through thought considering the universal appeal - or hatred - of helvetica - a very uniform [read: comforting/predictable] spacing of characters - is championed by the luminary designers of the sixties. an incredible contrast between print prior to its advent and afterward is what is most remarkable...remember vintage kitchy clip art adverts of the fifties? it is argued that helvetica brought about the practice of 're-branding' organizations for broader commercial appeal.

later in the film it's posited that that association is what lead to a backlash and departure from its use ... having been adopted as the face of corporations and government institutions - a wholly unsavory connection in the era of the Vietnam War - made way for the advent of 'grunge' design throughout the seventies and eighties [an interesting parallel artistically...think...sonically, that era brought us punk and that whole anarchist aesthetic]. and, sure enough, the film considers that the departure from helvetica certainly seemed to the old school of design at the time that "the barbarians were storming the gate."

the film traces its reputation full circle to today's designers incorporating and championing the classic helvetica again. in all, the film is an interesting foray into something that has become utterly ubiquitous - a younger designer even traced his fondness for the font to a recognition that it literally was the face of culture from his youth - illustrating the wider truth that something so seemingly static as a printed word has broader associations considering marketing, psychology, anthropology and perhaps, to some extent, our understanding of global, urban identity. as another designer referred to it: "helvetica is the perfume of the city."

an awareness, i think, that will linger with me for some time.

**nerdy cool: Matthew Cooper developed the Verdana typeface [the official font for all of our library's documents] for Microsoft in the late nineties.