What’s that font saying?
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
The 2007 movie ‘Helvetica’ explores the font and how it became so ubiquitous. The film shows it in signs and advertising in several nations; two places you might recall seeing it are the American Airlines logo and the signage in the New York subway system.
And, of course, your computer’s list of fonts. When Helvetica was designed in Switzerland in 1957, it was for a comparatively small group of graphic designers. Now anyone can click a drop-down menu to choose fonts of their own; this is liberating but also makes for plenty of bad design. (What could be well designed using Comic Sans? What purpose does that font serve?)
The filmmakers didn’t talk to us font dilettantes but to some of the world’s most revered designers. Wim Crouwel, a Dutch designer who first made an impact in the 1960s, lauded Helvetica for its ‘neutralism,’ in which ‘the meaning is in the content of the text. ... That’s why we loved Helvetica very much.’
But the more Helvetica caught on, the more ubiquitous it became, the more inevitable it was that young designers would struggle against it. New York designer Tobias Frere-Jones (the brother of music critic Sasha Frere-Jones) is of this later generation:
The sort of classical modernist line on how aware a reader should be of a typeface is that they shouldn’t be aware of it at all. It should be this crystal goblet there to just hold and display and organize the information. But I don’t think it’s really quite as simple as that. I think even if they’re not consciously aware of the typeface they’re reading, they’ll certainly be affected by it, the same way that an actor that’s miscast in a role will affect someone’s experience of a movie or play that they’re watching. They’ll still follow the plot, but, you know, be convinced or affected. I think typography is similar to that, where a designer choosing typefaces is essentially a casting director.
David Carson took this a step further. The designer behind the magazine Raygun’s innovative use of fonts was known for using 3’s as E’s, turning letters and numbers upside-down and sometimes just making stuff that was hard to read. But he did it on purpose: In the film, he explains how a piece on Bryan Ferry was incredibly boring, a heard-it-all-before profile -- it said nothing, so he laid it in the Zapf Dingbats font, so it read as nothing. (In Zapf Dingbats, letters are turned into little circles, stars and squares). ‘Don’t confuse legibility with communication,’ Carson said. ‘Just because something is legible doesn’t mean it communicates and, more importantly, doesn’t mean it communicates the right thing.’
No writer would want to have their work hijacked by a designer who deemed it unworthy, but Carson seems to be on to something. Fonts can be expressive -- and Helvetica expresses a kind of neutrality.
It’s too bad ‘Helvetica’ the film never turned its attention to books. I suppose it needn’t have, since Helvetica the font, a sans-serif, hasn’t made tremendous inroads into the text of books, which tend to have serif fonts (serif vs. sans-serif here). But I think that Carson and Frere-Jones are on to something -- that a typeface can be expressive.
How much does the look of the words on the page of a book affect how you perceive the content? Do you notice the font? Or is it just a crystal goblet?
-- Carolyn Kellogg
