A Movie About a Font

When I visited New York City with my family last Spring, I found an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art on the font Helvetica. It was assembled in honor of the font's 50th birthday, and featured in the exhibit were clips from a feature-length documentary. That's right, a documentary about a font. Being a graphic designer, and a typographic enthusiast, I knew this movie would be right up my alley; at the very least, it would be a hilarious thing to behold.

Helvetica screened in Pittsburgh last Fall, but I never got around to actually seeing it. Lucky for me, it returned to the Steel City just for this week, as part of the Pittsburgh Filmmaker's January line-up. So my friend and I made plans to check it out after I got out of work last Thursday. I can gladly say that this documentary, filmed by Gary Hustwit, is 80 minutes of graphic design bliss. It's funny, it's thought-provoking, and it made me proud of the profession that I have chosen.

For the college-educated graphic designer, Helvetica is sort of like watching the red carpet footage at the Academy Awards. The documentarians interview plenty of designers and typographers that I studied in school, and seeing them on the screen was a neat experience. (I will admit that the only part of the film where I felt truly dorky was when I got excited at Hermann Zapf's cameo). Helvetica has a multi-pronged approach to talking about the font: they discuss the font's history, its place within the Modernist graphic design movement, its cultural and political influence, and ubiquitous nature in our ever day lives. The pacing of the film is very unique in that Helvetica's popularity wanes as the runtime grows. Designers introduced in the beginning of the film are much more appreciative of Helvetica's place in design history, and some see it as the perfect Modernist sans serif. Later in the film, however, we meet the Post-Modernists who despise the clean, calculated nature of the Swiss-designed typeface.

One aspect of the discussion presented in the film was about the font's political and culture significance. Some designers felt that the font was very capitalistic, mainly because it was embraced by marketing departments in all of the big corporations in the 60's; others felt that the font was extremely socialistic, mainly because it is available on every PC and Mac and can therefore become a powerful design tool for the average man. While that's all very interesting, their views seem to stem not from the font itself, but rather from what has been done with the font since its introduction into the design world. I prefer to look at Helvetica as a I would most fonts: by how it can be used, and if it's the best font for the job. Helvetica seems to me to be the kind of font best used as a bold face on a large surface. It doesn't translate that well to smaller projects or body type. Helvetica Neue is another story--and a much better font overall.

In talking about the movie beforehand, I predicted that the documentarian would somehow shove in a political opinion about Helvetica in relation to Left versus Right rhetoric. That seems to be the goal of every documentary made lately, whether it's a movie about penguins or crossword puzzles. Sure enough, the filmmaker prodded a female designer in New York about her political views on Helvetica. She went on to make a hilariously absurd tie between Helvetica and the Vietnam War, and then imply that Republicans (specifically Reagan supporters) were Helvetica users. Twisted logic for sure, but also a pathetically hilarious move to shove that message in the movie.

Poli-typographic squabbles aside, Helvetica is a fantastic documentary. It's an invaluable film for graphic designers, and it's pretty darn funny for everyone else. Walking out of the theater that night, I quickly noticed Helvetica being used all around me in downtown Pittsburgh. It was good.