I spend all day looking at typefaces, carefully considering which to use and where, how much space to give the letters, the words, and how to balance the visually artistic aspects of type with pragmatic legibility and order. You would think that come the weekend, enough is enough. Nope. My rental du jour on Sunday was Helvetica, a documentary about the most common typeface in probably the entire western world. And it was pretty damn good.

The timeliness of this documentary is perfect, and not only because helvetica reached it’s 50th birthday in 2007. As the film points out, we’ve entered into a period in history where the tools of design are accessible to the public and social networking sites like Myspace allow the user to create their own designed pages as a means of fabricating their own identity. Since everyone has become an amateur designer, what better time to cast an eye on the most prevalent font in the world?

Helvetica is everywhere. Literally everywhere. I stare at type all day for a living, and it’s prevalence evades me at times. No matter who you are, you see it thousands of times over the course of a day, and you take helvetica for granted. It’s brilliance is it’s ability to be invisible. And if you’re a designer, it’s ability to take on the meaning from it’s context.

Director Gary Hustwit takes the time to not only show us how often we’ve walked by helvetica, never noticing it, even in prominent brand designs, but also though a series of interviews, delves into the history and many uses of the font over its lifespan. The film presents a balanced cache of interviews from designers and typographers of several generations and differing view points on the value of helvetica as a staple in type design, among them Massimo Vignelli, Matthew Carter, Wim Crouwel, David Carson, Stephan Sagmeister, Erik Spiekermann, Amsterdam based design group Experimental Jetset, and Zurich based design team Norm (made up of Dmitri Bruni and Manuel Krebs)….and many more.

Whether you love helvetica for it’s purity, or hate it for its modern cleanliness that was and is the backbone of corporate visual syntax, the film gives a clean and concise outline of the font’s history, various connotative meanings, and the evolution of typeography in relationship to helvetica. It’s a worthwhile watch for anyone who enjoys typography and the discourse around type and meaning.

And if watching the documentary only wets your appetite for more helvetica homage, you can pick up one of the awesome Hel-Fucking-vetica t-shirt Khoi Vinh designed back in 2006. He’s recently re-released them at Wire&Twine.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 1:19 am and is filed under art and theory, design, film + video, general, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.