Hail Helvetica

In a break with the bodily fascination, I’m going to talk about Helvetica.
The night before going to see this movie I’d sat through Alistair Barry’s A Civil Society – in which the audience of 46 consisted of 43 disgruntled teachers, Alistair Barry himself – and us. And while it’s not nice to state in a publicly available forum that I was bored shitless, I believe this is literally true for I don’t recall a single bowel movement for days afterward.

The film, of the topic of conversation every time I woke up was anything to go by, was bulk funding of education during the bad old days (clue : 1984 heralded the beginning of the Bad Old Days). For people from outside our disjointed islands, bulk funding meant schools got their whole funding from the government at once and then had to stretch it cross all expenses. From what I understand, the bulk fund was a fraction of what the government had previously paid when the financed things separately. From the boos and hisses in the audience, not to mention the grilling the messenger (Barrie) was subjected to at the end, I’d venture that bulk funding was not a popular move by the fourth Labour government. I was disappointed though – this in a Film Festival : totally wrong forum.
But it’s not even the film I’m writing about. The reason I mention A Civilised Society at all is to give a sense of the trepidation I felt at going, the very next night, to a film about a font.

And although we got to the place early – early enough to think about, but dismiss the idea of – grabbing a coffee we got one of the last seats. Every techno geek in the city worth their Macromedia stripes was there. Listening to all the murmured conversation around us, it was all the same “I used to use Helvetia a lot but, you know, it’s Century Gothic now. Respect, though. You know what I’m saying?”
The movie started with the earthiest and delicious scenes of blocks of Helvetica type being laid out and inked. There was a collective sigh of satisfaction from all around, THIS is what making type is all about and the calling from the opening scene to the symbolic ink still being scratched into the lines between the fingers of every tech designer, etched in, until it moved beneath the skin in answer ensured the film kept its audience through the whole thing.

So we had the history of Helvetica – how the Swiss designer wanted something weighted a little more heavily to the bottom, a little more rounded, a utilitarian font that was removed from its stentorian predecessors. And how it was originally to have been called Neue Haas Grotesk but was changed to Helvetica, to reflect the name for Switzerland and make it more saleable. And what the Wikipedia entry quotes of a designer in the film – Wim Crouwel – “It should be neutral. It shouldn’t have a meaning in itself. The meaning is in the content of the text and not in the typeface."

I’m glad this is the quote the author chose for Wikipedia because it’s the element on which the film hinged – most designers interviewed favoured this aspect of Helvetica, most particularly in its use as a signage font, but also for text. Yet, as one person, tongue in cheek, pointed out, it is also the font of the Vietnam and Iraq wars and has contributed to the creation of a popular ‘story’ underpinning US involvement in both wars. Helvetica gives – she says – (and I am writing this weeks later so it is by no means a guaranteed or direct quote) an authority and trust to those using it, but it also has a softening effect on authority so there is an underlying common touch : exactly the kind of emotion the warmongering propaganda seeks.

The designers who love Helvetica outweighed those who hate it for its bland neutrality. The ‘grunge fonts’ of the 90s and first 2 years of the 21st century were posited as a temporary reaction against Helvetica, and yet it is exactly THAT grungey kind of treatment of text that I miss; letting the text form one of the design elements of the page. This is a current bugbear : the way design is placed around the text; it doesn’t use the text as a design element. Is Helvetica to blame? The New Scientist, of all publications, has the best consistently good design of the print publications I read. The NZ Listener is among the worst.

As you can see, I recommend the film. I takes a good movie to unleash passionate responses to font use! If you get a chance, go see it, and get there early. Trust me on this.

Want a better appraisal of Helvetica? These websites are the business:
This, from Slate, describes Helvetica as the ‘tofu of fonts’ – and includes a quiz to see if you can tell the difference between Helvetica (font of choice of Macintosh) and Arial (the ‘pretender’ of Microsoft)


This, from the International Herald Tribune, is more of a potted history.