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Is it that adopting anti-corporate attitudes has become just another 21st century pose? Or do I have, somewhere deep within my liberal soul, a knee-jerk reactionary fighting to get out? Erik Spiekermann and Stefan Sagmeister are rather more interesting and considered, although one constantly gets the feeling that the anti-Helvetica fraternity are a lot more censorious and illiberal than the supporters. Both designers have the kind of absolute certainty in their own coolness that makes me want to scream. There’s much entertainment value to be had in watching Paula Scher mouth radical platitudes with toe-curling smugness and viewing David Carson’s revolutionary but hilariously dated work on the magazine Ray Gun. Other people, notably graphic designers such as David Carson, hate it because they consider it safe and boring Carson seems, by his own admission, to have built an entire career around a reaction against Helvetica. Hustwit’s film features the designer Paula Scher ranting about how Helvetica was the font of the Vietnam War and is now responsible for the conflict in Iraq. Large numbers of people hate Helvetica for what they see as its stifling social conformity and the way its supposed neutrality leads consumers to confuse marketing messages with informational messages. The inevitable response to the prospect of viewing Helvetica is, why would anyone want to make a film about a font? Well, Gary Hustwit’s answer is that fonts affect our lives because they are everywhere, sending out signals and communicating with us almost independently of the messages they are spelling out. However, fifty years on, Helvetica is seen as the typeface of big-business and, for many people, the enemy of individuality. The typeface has its origins in a post-war desire to make information democratic by presenting it in a clear, easy-to-read font. The name was changed in 1960 to Helvetica which means, literally, the Swiss typeface. This ubiquity might not have been achieved had the original name been used – Neue Haas Grotesk – since that sounds like a German bondage nightclub to me.
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Since its inception, Helvetica has become ubiquitous, not least because Microsoft adapted it as Arial which was the standard on the pre-Vista versions of Windows. You are reading it on DVD Times in a sans-serif font. I am typing this using Book Antiqua which is a serif font. Already, upon hearing this information, my head was swimming until it was explained – with calm authority – that ‘sans-serif’ meant letters without serifs and that a serif is a little detail on the end of a letter stroke. Helvetica is a sans-serif font designed in Switzerland in 1957. It’s this conviction that encouraged Gary Hustwit to make Helvetica, a surprisingly compelling documentary about a fifty year old font which is the most commonly used typeface in the world. That anyone could get so worked up about a typeface is an indication that, to many people, type really matters.
HELVETICA FONT DOCUMENTARY LICENSE
What is the cause of his disquiet? Nothing more or less than the billion dollar corporation’s refusal to license fonts from their official designers, preferring instead to make minor adjustments and rename them.
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“Mean Bastards!” complains type designer Erik Spiekermann about Microsoft. A fascinating documentary about a ubiquitous typeface presented on a nice DVD from Plexifilm.