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Helvetica

Watching the film Helvetica left me feeling more involved in the world. We all see the font helvetica day to day whether it’d be in advertising, maps, or simply on a paper for an assignment. I loved seeing flashes of just how often helvetica is used. Maybe I don’t appreciate so much that we use that font so often, but it was interesting to see how much of it we all don’t acknowledge it surrounding us. It was very funny for me to see that helvetica is what is used for subway directions. I spend my breaks and summers mainly in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn with my friends. It’s something I’ve never noticed. But what I’ve noticed over time was whenever I read a those subway signs I feel okay. Hearing some of the designers talk about emotion through purely font was something that made sense to me. Nothing is better than taking the path from hoboken and seeing “Journal Square to 33rd St.” in that simple sleek familiar font. The gap between the letters in fonts is something that I have always payed attention to, whether intentional or not. Massimo Vingnelli said, “It’s the space between black that makes it”. Mike Parker echoed that talking about the “interrelationship of negative space” and how “the space between hold the letters”. All of these stood out to me and brought me back to the times I would go through fonts and look at the spacing between and see what I liked and what bothered me.

Helvetica font is comforting to me in the fact that its uniform and consistent. But Erik Spiekermann said, “Rythm, contrast it comes from handwriting…helvetica has none of that”. I loved this because I am intrigued by everyone’s, individual, handwriting or font choices. Or how Paula Scher said that “font could be your own medium”, that was something I hadn’t thought about. I always thought that font was the afterthought to the context. I was cool to hear designers perspectives of fonts. But when I thought about using font as a medium, instead of particularly the content, It seemed like something that I feel you never really know when it is finished. But seeing Stefan Stagmeister’s work, this made more sense. Stagmeister said “when I get bored of working on a typeface, I leave them alone”. That to me made me think of working with fontfaces as like working with pastel, paint, pencil or charcoal. That you can leave things when you feel done, even if others don’t consider it done. Going back to Scher’s point, that the font is the medium. This makes me feel more comfortable with graphic design and working with fontfaces. David Carson said “don’t confuse legibility with understanding”. That secured me in the feeling that working with types doesn’t need to be so “helvetica” all the time. It doesn’t need to be the default that you use, you can choose your own font to use, or multiple fonts. Watching Helvetica broke down the wall for me to look at Graphic Design and not be so scared, but relate to it and feel more comfortable with experimenting.