KAI'S ßLØG: October 2012

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Helvetica

Kai Workman

10/10/12

2˚

Helvetica the Movie

Helvetica was created in the year 1957 in Switzerland. Its original name is Die Neue Haas Grotesk. The current name Helvetica literally means the Swedish font. Helvetica popularized the Swedish design movement.

In “Helvetica,” many designers were interviewed. Among them were:

Massimo Vignelli: An Italian designer who has done work in a number of areas ranging form package design to furniture design to public signage to showroom design. His motto is “If you can design one thing, you can design everything,” and it is supported through all of the areas he has worked in.

Matthew Carter: An English type designer who is continuing the family tradition. His father, Harry Carter, was also a type designer. He designed the early 1.0 web fonts Verdana and Georgia.

Paula Scher: Se is an American graphic designer, illustrator, painter, art educator in design, and the first female principle at Pentagram (design studio), which she joined in 1991.

David Carson: He is an American graphic designer. He is best known for his innovative magazine design and his use of experimental typography. He was the art director got the magazine Ray Gun. Carson is considered one of the most influential graphic designers of the 1990’s. In particular, his widely aesthetic defined the so-called “grunge typography” era.

This movie also mentioned design styles including: Swiss design, modernism, post modernism, grunge, and experimental modernism.

I also extracted some insight about design and typography from the film. I learned that one of the reasons why Helvetica is so great is that it is the space between the letters that makes the font look so right. It seems like the space is holding and clasping the letters so it could exist no other way. It was also said that Helvetica is so great because it is such a typeface that it is open to interpretation. It is neutral and lets the words pain the picture in the readers’ brain, not the text itself.

On the flip side, different designers feel that Helvetica has ben used so much that it has lost its power. One of the designers made the point that just because a text is legible, doesn’t mean it says the word. He was saying that you need different fonts to say different words, but this was very different to many of the other designers.

Helvetica is everywhere, and to support this I went around my High School’s campus taking photos of the timeless font.