Helvetica Movie

Helvetica

Jeremiah Kinnamon

This was an interesting idea for a documentary and as a documentary it is also more imaginative than I expected going into it. The concept of the film was the ubiquity and endless possibilities inherent to a 50 year old typeface, that has crept over the written language, infusing itself to all facets of society.

The film clearly illustrates how something that we see everyday can be there and we don’t really notice it, as Michael Beirut put it, “You know, there it is, and it seems to come from nowhere. You know, it seems like air? It seems like gravity?” So for someone that needs to pay attention to things like these, I wasn’t as surprised as I could have been, because for years I have been paying attention to these things, however, for most people who aren’t designers, this could be like discovering a new layer in their visual world.

Words, as the film shows us, are everywhere and there is a good chance that the words in front of us are part of the Helvetica font family. The power of the font is that it is so good at being there, conveying information, and not really getting in the way of that process. I think that is why so many people may not realize what it is they are seeing, that the font on that street sign and the font on their DVD player manual are the same. The simple elegance that has enabled it to pervade our written culture and change our visual landscape is captured by the film and is clearly shown to be one of the most important typefaces of the century.

The other side of the font are those people that wish we could have another font to look at. Because Helvetica has become so ubiquitous, it has begun to force a sort of conformity and ritualized expectation into our visual lives, making it more difficult to be different. So while Helvetica is an excellent font, we must be careful to not overuse this typeface, lest we end up limiting ourselves as designers, and failing as stewards of our visual environment. It could be worse, I suppose. The designers of the world could be infatuated with a different, suckier font, like Trajan or Comic Sans.

Whether one chooses to go with the safe and reliable (but always elegant) Helvetica or break the mold and try something new (not Trajan) is something to consider. The truth is that at one time or another, Helvetica will be the perfect font for a particular project but there are many, many fonts out there and we should not limit ourselves to only one.