Helvetica, The Movie / Helvetica, The Idea
You have to give credit to someone who will make a movie about a font, but that is what the documentary Helvetica attempted. I’d heard positive things about the film and finally decided to sample it via a Netflix stream.
In some ways this is a documentary about taste and about consensus. The Helvetica font was settled upon by large institutions, as an acceptable, non-offensive, bridge from modernism into the contemporary. Helvetica expressed bland authority and unquestioned entitlement.
In some ways, the Helvetica font is the Trajan font of our age — the font you see on Roman buildings and governmental buildings in America — invisible by its ubiquity. A cold and anonymous typeface whose chief attribute is legibility — although Trajan has an authentic beauty of form Helvetica does not. That said, I am sympathetic with the designers who feel that typefaces deliver content but aren’t the content. So Helvetica does its utilitarian job.
The array of designers commenting on the font had its own interest. One overwrought designer likened Helvetica to a glass of fresh water on the desert of awful, terrible, horrible 19th century design. Personally, I like much about 19th century design, although Helvetica is okay as well. It would take an effort to get too worked up about this peripheral realm of design.
One other designer pointed out the push/pull in Helvetica — a Hans Hofmann, abstract expressionist idea — the tension between ground and figure. The sharp insight was that Helvetica had a perfect fit between ground and typeface. Helvetica is of the grid and the machine and it locks in place visually.
The problem with Helvetica is that it is dead, drained of human interest, and purely utilitarian. The strange conflation of ideas that images are always conjuring: Helvetica is both socialist in its aspirations and corporate in its manifestations. Helvetica is not personal, but astringently impersonal. On the other hand, minimalism works very well in graphic and industrial design: witness Apple.
