Helvetica Thoughts

helveticaSome thoughts from watching Helvetica, a documentary just about the Helvetica font:

  • Helvetica is everywhere.
  • Fonts are more than a mere messenger. Sure, nothing new there.  That Helvetica can carry so many different meanings from so many companies/governments/artists is impressive.
  • This guy summed up the differing views of Helvetica in one quote better than I can: “The clean, cool look of modernism or the sleek, sinister accomplice of hegemonic globalization?”
  • Using Helvetica to fast-track your company’s brand association with modernism seems like a good call at first … but if you tie your core logo to Helvetica completely, your brand is effectively at the whim of (admittedly slow-changing) fickle stereotypes.  Example: What happens to American Apparel when Helvetica loses the association that they originally latched onto?  Erik Spiekermann makes the case that the Marlboro brand owns the distinctive font they use … and it seems like company brands using Helvetica are more-or-less owned by the font.
    Update: I just noticed that American Apparel’s new product uses a distinctive font. A handful of their recent ads use it … maybe they’re changing?
  • The post-modern (Helvetica is modernism) font movement towards David-Carson-eqsue/difficult-to-read/handwritten/hand-drawn/expressive/loaded fonts has generally seemed not-very-useful to me … but Stefan Sagmeister said something that made the movement make a little more sense: (paraphrasing in my own words) ’Sometimes having a font that is hard to read - that takes some time to read - can convey the same about the underlying content.  For example, an album thats takes a few listens … or art that needs to be studied to comprehand … using a difficult-to-read font lets the reader know that they will need to invest time to understand the content, too.’  I’m not saying I’ll find a place to use illegible fonts, but I can see some of the reasoning.

As a final thought: Helvetica made me curious about typography for Chinese and other glyph-based (non alphabet) languages.  Did/do those written languages experience modernism/post-modernism in a similar way?  As someone with near-zero knowledge of Asian languages, I’m going to need to build a bit of a foundation before I can really understand the answer to my question.

6 comments to “Helvetica Thoughts”...
  1. […] lesson: much like Helvetica (the font), a good song (like a good font) can hold many different meanings for many different messages to […]

  2. I totally just watched that documentary for class… Okay not really I napped through it… It was really boring… and Helvetica is a boring font… right down to the documentary…. ^_^

  3. A brief comment as to what the graphic is about would be appreciated. In fact this looks a lot like plain new Arial.

  4. actually was looking to check that error message again …

  5. Helvetica is what you get when you want to close-off a concept with perfection. Helvetica is one of the only things that has ever gotten close to perfection (no room for improvement) anything that comes after it, is somewhat secondary. Use it, appreciate it, but dont abuse it.

    ps. Arial came WAY after Helvetica. Arial is just a cheap (baaaad) copy.

  6. Yes, Asian fonts including all Chinese/Japanese/Korean fonts have a full-blown font culture to them. You’ll find probably the most impressive graphic design in businesses of Taipei, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing and other large modern cities.

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