“I LUV HELVETICA” (NOT)

Thanks to marvelous book designer Anna Bauer, I am posting the following story from Douglas Coupland’s Blog at the New York Times website. Those of you who studied graphic design with me at Parsons and NYU know that I am not a Helvetica fan. However, Ed Benguiat, the brilliant designer who introduced me to the world of typography, loves Helvetica and that counts a lot. Now there’s a Helvetica film! Check out the link at the bottom of the page to learn all about it. Anna says it’s an opportunity for students or anyone with extra time to participate. (Extra time)? I personally liked it best when the word “Helvetica” appeared on a t-shirt set in ITC Garamond.

August 27, 2006

I LUV HELVETICA

I think the most common set-decorating error in films these days can be reduced to one word: Helvetica. I’ll be watching a World War I drama, and there at a train station in the background is a sign saying “Ypres” in
200-point Helvetica Bold. Movie over – at least for me. Once I see Helvetica in any pre-1957 movie, all I can think is that the art director was so clueless he either used Helvetica in a historical drama, or hired someone stupid enough to do so, and never double-checked the work.

In art school I studied typography for several years. This was pre-Macintosh, and we had to draw fonts by hand using gouache, including numbers and diacritical marks. In 1982 there were maybe 50,000 people in North America who knew what kerning is. Today, my 10-year-old nephew knows what it is.

Typography has been massively democratized and has now done more wonderful things in 10 years than in the hundreds preceding it. I remember my type instructor, Greg, moaning, “Typography is over. Nothing new will ever
happen with type ever again. Why do we even bother waking up in the morning?” I note that the moment you hear somebody say something’s over, it usually means that something massive is about to happen. Francis Fukuyama, meet Osama bin Laden and discuss the end of history.

In the world of type, Helvetica was the supposed endpoint of design. It was designed to be 100-percent emotionally neutral (yes, how Swiss, the same country that brought us sleeping pills – Helvetica is the Latin name for
Switzerland), and when it was marketed in 1961, it caused a revolution, because everything the font touched it modernized. Helvetica essentially takes any word or phrase and pressure-washes it into sterility. I love it. So does Panasonic, BASF, Bayer, American Airlines, PanAm, Lufthansa, BellSouth, Hapag-Lloyd and any number of other firms that use it for their logos and as their house font.

When I began writing fiction, I was naturally curious about the relationship of words on a page and how the words look on a page. By 1995 I began experimenting freely with the “lookfeel” of words in my novel, “Microserfs.”
In it I had pages of words that did and didn’t correlate to the main narrative. I did these in Helvetica. The book dealt with people who work at Microsoft (who developed their own Helvetica clone, the cheesy wannabe Arial) and I was wondering, well, if machines daydream, what would their daydreams look like? And so I did pages to demonstrate.

PS: Helvetica is even getting its own movie!

http://www.helveticafilm.com/

(Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface [which will celebrate its 50th birthday in 2007] as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. Helvetica will begin screening at film festivals worldwide starting in early 2007.