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Who Knows Helvetica
Who Only Helvetica Knows?
The Stop Smiling DVD Review
Friday, December 14, 2007
Helvetica
Directed by Gary Hustwit
(Swiss Dots, in associtation with Veer)
Reviewed by Anthony Frewin
Here's Jack Armstrong, relaxing in his trailer somewhere in the Midwest. He’s now opening his fourth can of beer of the evening. He’s just watched Gary Hustwit’s documentary, and freely admits prior to that he didn’t know "typefaces from shit." So, what’s he learnt?
What have I learnt? I’ll tell you.
1) There’s this typeface called Helvetica that you can only really use for storefronts and signs. You can also use it if you’re a big corporation — other than that, forget it. They don’t want to know you.
2) Some Swiss guys came up with the idea out of the blue back in the Fifties. So it’s a big export for them, like cuckoo clocks and chocolate.
3) The film shows you this Helvetica, then it gets mixed up and shows you other typefaces, like ones that are really fat and ones that are really thin. So, you think, 'Does this Hustwit guy know what he’s doing?'
4) If you want to be a good graphic designer, you’ve got to know how to keep your place tidy — like, really tidy. Like, be really obsessive. These guys ain’t ever heard the word clutter.
5) A bunch of guys got really pissed off with this Helvetica crap and they invented "grunge typography." But that didn’t last long, because this guy tattooed his body with a pen nib or something and it probably went septic.
6) Hustwit? From films like this he makes his living? I’ll give Helvetica II a miss, that’s for sure.
The title of this documentary is a con. It’s Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. True, the designers and others riff about Helvetica, but the typeface is never onstage, unless you count these endless shots of signage. Hustwit’s main concern is the designers themselves. He’s a name-banger, and the gushing prose of his liner notes — quite aside from the film itself — underscores his status as a groupie of the graphic arts. Which is all very well, but this should have been titled something like Name Designers Rapping (!) or whatever.
It puzzled me as to who the intended audience was. Here’s what Hustwit writes: "We wanted the film to be accessible to people who had little or no design experience, but still be entertaining for people who design for a living."
I guess it depends on what you mean by accessible, and Hustwit’s accessible certainly isn’t mine. If the film was aimed at people who had little or no design experience, then how about some basics? How about explaining what serif and sans-serif faces are? Explaining to the Jack Armstrongs of this world that Helvetica is a family with many different weights and that it wasn’t the first sans-serif ever to be designed? Is this too much to ask? How about putting Helvetica into perspective by showing its historical antecedents, starting with William Caslon’s "Egyptian" of 1816? By tracing the evolution of "sans surryphs" through the 19th century, then the News and Franklin Gothic of ATF say. The calligrapher Edward Johnston’s type for the London Underground (1916, and still used) that would give rise to Eric Gill’s famous face? Erbar and, later, Paul Renner’s glorious Futura, both in Germany, in the Twenties? Monotype’s Grots? Univers? And so on.
How can one possibly understand Helvetica without knowing where it came from? This is a fascinating story and could have been presented in 10 minutes or so and would have obviated Jack Armstrong thinking Helvetica was invented "out of the blue."
If Hustwit can’t be bothered to tell us whence Helvetica came, he sure doesn’t tell us whence it will go. And where will it go? Its ubiquity is already fading and fading fast as new designers and typographers redesign what went before them. It's doubtful that, in the future, any typeface will achieve the ubiquity of Helvetica. A couple of generations ago it took battalions of artisans and craftsmen, quite aside from the designer, to get a new typeface on the streets. Whereas now a typeface can be designed in the morning and broadcast to the world after lunch. New faces rise up almost daily.
Hustwit nowhere actually looks at the typeface, nowhere examines it. The nearest we get is a brief shot where the counter of a lower case is floated out — and that’s it. A few minutes examining the characters themselves would have given a real dimension to the film. Why is this character designed like this, and that one like that? And questions like, for example: Why, as a text face, is Helvetica "warmer" than Gill Sans? No time for any of this — gotta be out there name-checking.
And what about some animated graphics using Helvetica? These would have demonstrated the face’s potential and added some sorely needed humor to the documentary. I’m thinking along the lines of "kinetic" typography, things like Steve Hooley’s typographic interpretation of Lowell Fulson’s "Tramp" (view here), or Jarratt Moody’s wondrous type-a-go-go of "What does Marsellus Wallace look like?" from Pulp Fiction (view here).
Jack Armstrong rightly concludes from his viewing that Helvetica can only be used for shops and signs and by corporations. Hustwit claims to have "been interested in graphic design and typography for over 20 years" and, indeed, he "stumbled" into book publishing, yet he totally ignores what may be the most creative and interesting use of Helvetica, and that is in good book design (I guess he "stumbled" out, too).
Books? Forget it. They aren’t mentioned once, and I guess the reason is Hustwit doesn’t find them "sexy" in the way he finds all the corporate/global stuff sexy. But then he’s a groupie for this, too.
Take, for example, the first half of the 20th century in America. Who were the great typographers who added to and advanced the craft, whose work continues to inspire us today? They were people like Bruce Rogers, W.A. Dwiggins, D.B. Updike, Frederick W. Goudy. Book designers all. And this is a tradition Hustwit either ignores or has never heard of. Perhaps they aren’t "cool" enough?
Thinking of Dr Johnson’s remark in another context that it isn’t how well it is done, but that it is done at all, may explain the good reviews Helvetica has got. That and the supposed novelty of the venture.
The film was a great opportunity to educate and engage people in typography and it is an opportunity that has been roundly and firmly squandered. Don’t bother with this. Go to YouTube and type TYPOGRAPHY into the search box (view here). You’ll find dozens of things that really are worth watching.
Anthony Frewin was an assistant to Stanley Kubrick from 1965 until 1999, aside from some years in the Seventies when he worked in book publishing as a typographer and editor. He reckons the most beautiful typeface in the world is Monotype Bembo, Series 270