Helvetica (the film): A Review

Do you know what font you are using right now? If you are on a Mac the default is Helvetica. Microsoft uses a clone called Arial. (Isn’t that typical of MS to take a classic and fuck it up just enough to call it their own?)

I went to a documentary film several weeks ago about a famous typeface (a font to computer users) called Helvetica. I promised several friends that I would tell them about the film, being the procrastinator that I am I way ahead of schedule.

The typeface Helvetica was created in Switzerland fifty years ago as the ultimate modern type and survives today on many corporate logos, street signs, and most any where that needs easy to read, clean instructions. And now, in the hands of several young avant-garde graphic designers it is being reborn all over again.

How boring can an hour and a half film be about something we see everyday and to which we never pay attention? (Or so we think.) Damn interesting, thanks to the skills of the veteran documentary producer and director Gary Hustwit. And where else, except the Tivoli would you expect to see a lot of techno-nerds buying popcorn and coke to see a documentary film?

Who comes to see a movie about a typeface? There were old people, one had silver-blue hair, and another even had an oxygen bottle. The majority were late twenty, early thirty somethings. A lot of the guys had the spiked Ty Bennington look alike hair.
Women were more business like. Lots of horn-rimmed glasses. Many of the crowd came as groups of employees of graphic design firms. The pre-reality art crowd (aka KCAI) that you see on First Fridays was mercifully missing.

It was a tech savvy crowd. Before the film began the dim light of the theater was aglow with the light of cell phone screens. Almost like a den of fireflies. Of course everyone was multi-tasking on their phone while talking to the person next to them.

As to the film? It was a documentary. So please don’t look for a climatic ending. It had an “in your face cinematography” (overheard on the way out; “I can’t believe how yellow their teeth were.”). Seriously, the film allowed the top graphic designers of the last fifty years to tell us how they have used, abandoned and re-used the type Helvetica. For many there is a love/hate relationship with this typeface.

That is what makes Helvetica a good film. In unscripted interviews we get to see the raw personalities of people that have, unknown to many of us (at least to me), dominated our visual culture for years. Some of the graphic artist are hilarious, some primadonas, most egotists, and once in a while a nice person. Meet the people that have been influencing (and will continue to) our lives with a tool called print. And for the last 50 years many times that print has been Helvetica.

Post Script.
How do you pronounce Helvetica? I was totally surprised to find that Americans use a soft a, as Hell vat a ca. The Europeans use hard vowels, Hell ve te ca.

Post Post Script.
Did you know that the American Airlines logo, still in use today was one of the first corporate logos to be designed using Helvetica? And it was the first to merge words…. AmericanAirlines.

An especial thank you to: memyi