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Helvetica

When I was in college, I watched a documentary called *Helvetica*, which is so named because it focuses much of its time on that particular typeface. It goes through how it was first designed and developed, and it discusses how it became as ubiquitous as it is today. It isn't only about that, though. It's as much about the typeface as it is about graphic design in general, and what graphic design was and has become since the 1950s.

As far as Helvetica goes, it's clear that designers like it because it's simple, legible, readable, recognizable, and available. It will always pass the "crystal goblet" test: it's so widely used and so minimalistic that the typeface itself is practically invisible. The information that it's conveying is always what you will notice first, because the font calls no attention to itself at all. It's basically the number 2 pencil or the ballpoint pen of fonts; it's extremely serviceable and has absolutely no bells or whistles.

I didn't recall very much about this documentary, but I decided to revisit it recently because of one segment that has always stuck with me. Over the course of the documentary, there are many people who praise Helvetica and everything that it is, and have a kind of excitement about it that I don't really understand. It's as if they're telling you how incredible sliced bread is; sure, it's a great invention, but I can't imagine ever speaking passionately about it. There is one man in the documentary in particular, however, who clearly loves it far more than any of the others, and that is Michael Bierut. He loves it so much, that it seems that he has grown to hate everything else that isn't Helvetica or doesn't have Helvetica on it.

He bothers me quite a bit.

I didn't know who he was before I watched this documentary, and it wasn't until years later that I learned who he was. He's a designer who has worked for the influential design firm Pentagram, and has been at least partially responsible for rebrands of some of the largest companies in the world. He has been a lecturer on graphic design at Yale. Some of his work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as a number of others high profile art museums.

He's also kind of a jerk, at least based on what you see of him in the *Helvetica* documentary.

Look, I recognize that all art is subjective, and people have different tastes, but there are good ways to criticize things and bad ways. Michael Bierut, at least in this documentary, does not use any of the good ways. At about 25 minutes in, he says this:

I imagine there was a time when it just felt so good to take something that was old and dusty and homemade and crappy looking and replace it with Helvetica. It just must have felt like you were scraping the crud off of like, filthy old things and restoring them to shining beauty. And in fact corporate identity in the sixties, that's what it sort of consisted of. Clients would come in and they'd have like, you know, piles of goofy old brochures from the fifties, that had like shapes on them and goofy bad photographs. They'd have some letterhead that would say Amalgamated Widget on the top in some goofy, maybe a script typeface, above Amalgamated Widget it would have an engraving showing their headquarters in Paducah, Iowa, with smokestacks belching smoke, you know, and then you go to a corporate identity consultant circa 1965, 1966, and they would take that and lay it here and say, "Here's your current stationery, and all it implies, and this is what we're proposing." And next to that, next to the belching smokestacks and the nuptual script and the ivory paper, they'd have a crisp, bright, white piece of paper, and instead of Amalgamated Widget, founded 1857, it just would say Widgco, in Helvetica Medium. Can you imagine how bracing and thrilling that was? That must have seemed like you had crawled through a desert with your mouth just caked with filthy dust, and then someone is offering you a clear, refreshing, distilled icy glass of water to kind of clear away all this horrible, kind of like, burden of history. It must have just been fantastic. And you know it must have been fantastic because it was done over and over and over again.

Wow.

The only thing that I'm reminded of is someone walking into an old house with beautiful, well-kept hardwood floors and saying, "You know what this place needs? Linoleum." And he would say it as if he were giving you the best advice he had ever given anyone. He's praising the idea of people taking something with so much character and personality and reducing it to an empty, lifeless shell.

It's also difficult to convey in text the amount of disdain for these things that you can hear in his voice. In the next section of the documentary, it shows him pulling out some old magazines and talking about the advertising design, and on screen you see a number of lovely, charming ads from the 1940's and 50's with hand drawn illustrations and hand lettering. To hear him tell it, however, these are the ugliest things that you could ever come across.

So, this is what I'm talking about. This is Life Magazine, 1953. One ad after another in here, that just kind of shows every single visual bad habit that was, like, endemic in those days. You've got, you know, zany hand lettering everywhere, swash typography to kind of signify elegance, exclamation points, exclamation points, exclamation points. Cursive wedding invitation typography down here reading, "Almost everyone appreciates the best." This was everywhere in the Fifties. This is how everything looked in the Fifties.

You cut to, this is after Helvetica was in full swing. Same product. No people, no smiling fakery, just a beautiful, big glass of ice-cold Coke. The slogan underneath: It's the Real Thing. Period. Coke. Period. In Helvetica. Period. Any questions? Of course not. Drink Coke. Period. Simple.

So, basically, ads got way more boring after Helvetica came around, and he thinks that's a good thing. One wonders what an illustrator did to his mother to make hiim so angry about all of this.

Again, I'm not saying that he can't like Helvetica, or have a preference for it. It's fine if he wants to do that. It just feels ignorant and short-sighted to say that basically everything before Helvetica was garbage and everything with Helvetica in it is a work of art. Being a successful, influential designer and lecturer isn't even an excuse for this. In fact, I would think that someone who lectures and writes books on design would need to have more knowledge and respect for the history of art and design than the rest of us would.

The attitude he displays here seems to be one of modernity at all costs, including the cost of forgetting what came before. This is a dangerous way of thinking in my opinion, though it seems to be a way that a lot of influential people and people in power think.