Love Letters

Fifteen years or so ago, when type designer Matthew Carter told people what he did for a living, he met with incomprehension. At that time making typefaces seemed akin to writing the Bible – something that had obviously been done by someone at some point but that hardly needed doing again. Then the computer came along and changed everything. The names of typefaces became well known from drop-down menus, and many people, writers of CVs and job applications in particular, began to indulge in long, even tortured thoughts about their nuances. No longer appearing to be set in stone, letterforms are now recognized as mutable and meaningful.

Matthew Carter tells this anecdote in the new documentary Helvetica (2007) made by Gary Hustwit, which was premiered at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, on 13 March this year. As its name suggests, the film concentrates on the world’s best-known sanserif typeface and marks the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its design. Desktop publishing technologies may have made us ready for a film that touches on spacing and kerning, but they haven’t eradicated the need for a substantial amount of scene-setting. Computer users have become better acquainted with the typefaces that they use on screen, but this documentary follows the trail of letterforms that remain all but invisible. For good or ill, Helvetica’s geometric forms litter the urban environment so densely that most of us barely notice them. Over the course of the film they are likened, with differing degrees of affection, to air, gravity, fast food and perfume.

The interviews with designers and critics that make up the bulk of Helvetica are interspersed with a series of filmic essays. Set to a soundtrack, much of which was specially composed by musicians including Sam Prekop, Four Tet, Kim Hiorthøy and Motohiro Nakashima, Hustwit’s meditations on Helvetica add up to a fascinatingly detailed set of urban portraits. The focus on the common typographic element emphasizes the difference between cities: while New York brands and Zurich instructs, London peels and buckles. Admittedly Hustwit’s view is partial: most of the London part of the film was made in the area around his office in one of the city’s most dilapidated neighbourhoods. All the same, the documentary offers a rejoinder to the notion of global homogeneity. It turns out that, as well as taking Helvetica out of Switzerland, its nation of origin, you can also pretty much expunge the Swissness from the typeface.

As well as making the typeface visible, Helvetica also reveals the profession behind it. We are shown men (in a fairly accurate reflection of the industry, all but two of the people interviewed in the film are men) who make, use and think about type. Apart from the astute and measured Carter, they include the dangerously garrulous Erik Spiekermann, who likens his enthusiasm for type to other people’s appreciation of women’s bottoms; the explosively entertaining Michael Bierut, who explains the archetypal Helvetica-using corporation with the invention of the hypothetical multinational Widgco; and former typographic prodigy Jonathan Hoefler, who designed type for Rolling Stone magazine while still a teenager and who confects the most elaborate typographic descriptions – such as ‘this has that Saturn 5 rocket early NASA quality, but it needs to have that orange plastic Olivetti typewriter, Roman Holiday espresso feeling’.

For the most part Hustwit conducts his interviews in his subjects’ working environments. Carter sits in front of a well-stocked shelf in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Spiekermann swans into a Berlin office peopled with bright young assistants and parks himself under an Ingo Maurer Zettel’z chandelier, and Bierut stands in the New York offices of the Pentagram design consultancy against a backdrop of metal-framed windows overlooking a busy traffic junction.

The best location of all belongs to the most consistent and faithful of Helvetica-using designers: the Italian-born New Yorker Massimo Vignelli. In the late 1960s Vignelli designed the signage system for the New York subway. Extraordinary though it may seem in this digital age, Helvetica was still not available in New York more than ten years after its design in Switzerland, so Vignelli had to make do with the nearest possible alternative. Since then the system has been revised to real Helvetica, and the designer’s faith in the potential of universal, perfect communication survives undimmed.

At the age of 76 Vignelli continues to work from his town house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He receives Hustwit in a high-ceilinged room dominated by an enormous dark-wood-framed, mullioned window. His chair is ergonomic, and the table in front of him is empty but for a paper tray and two perfectly sharpened pencils. Using a single sheet, Vignelli demonstrates that the power of a typeface comes not from the forms of the letters themselves but from the spaces that they frame. It’s hard to imagine a more seductive display of sweetly tempered Minimalism.

Among the younger designers interviewed in the documentary is Michael C. Place, formerly of the talented Sheffield-based graphic design irritants The Designers Republic and now a partner in the London consultancy Build. Interviewed in a less salubrious setting than Vignelli (for some reason he chooses to sit among packing boxes and bubble wrap), he is no less a fan of the order and restraint of the sanserif. His devotion is such that he attempted to insert a note of thanks to the typeface’s ostensible designer, Max Miedinger, in the order of service for his wedding (apparently his wife-to-be was having none of it). Earlier in the film, however, we learn that while the typeface sales clerk Miedinger had drafted the letterforms, the design was created in close collaboration with Eduard Hoffman, the director of the Haas’sche Schriftgießerei foundry in Basel, where he worked. To thank Miedinger without acknowledging Hoffman just wouldn’t be right. It seems that even Helvetica’s keenest admirers can learn something from Hustwit’s film.

Emily King is design editor of frieze.Fifteen years or so ago, when type designer Matthew Carter told people what he did for a living, he met with incomprehension. At that time making typefaces seemed akin to writing the Bible – something that had obviously been done by someone at some point but that hardly needed doing again. Then the computer came along and changed everything. The names of typefaces became well known from drop-down menus, and many people, writers of CVs and job applications in particular, began to indulge in long, even tortured thoughts about their nuances. No longer appearing to be set in stone, letterforms are now recognized as mutable and meaningful.

Matthew Carter tells this anecdote in the new documentary Helvetica (2007) made by Gary Hustwit, which was premiered at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, on 13 March this year. As its name suggests, the film concentrates on the world’s best-known sanserif typeface and marks the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its design. Desktop publishing technologies may have made us ready for a film that touches on spacing and kerning, but they haven’t eradicated the need for a substantial amount of scene-setting. Computer users have become better acquainted with the typefaces that they use on screen, but this documentary follows the trail of letterforms that remain all but invisible. For good or ill, Helvetica’s geometric forms litter the urban environment so densely that most of us barely notice them. Over the course of the film they are likened, with differing degrees of affection, to air, gravity, fast food and perfume.

The interviews with designers and critics that make up the bulk of Helvetica are interspersed with a series of filmic essays. Set to a soundtrack, much of which was specially composed by musicians including Sam Prekop, Four Tet, Kim Hiorthøy and Motohiro Nakashima, Hustwit’s meditations on Helvetica add up to a fascinatingly detailed set of urban portraits. The focus on the common typographic element emphasizes the difference between cities: while New York brands and Zurich instructs, London peels and buckles. Admittedly Hustwit’s view is partial: most of the London part of the film was made in the area around his office in one of the city’s most dilapidated neighbourhoods. All the same, the documentary offers a rejoinder to the notion of global homogeneity. It turns out that, as well as taking Helvetica out of Switzerland, its nation of origin, you can also pretty much expunge the Swissness from the typeface.

As well as making the typeface visible, Helvetica also reveals the profession behind it. We are shown men (in a fairly accurate reflection of the industry, all but two of the people interviewed in the film are men) who make, use and think about type. Apart from the astute and measured Carter, they include the dangerously garrulous Erik Spiekermann, who likens his enthusiasm for type to other people’s appreciation of women’s bottoms; the explosively entertaining Michael Bierut, who explains the archetypal Helvetica-using corporation with the invention of the hypothetical multinational Widgco; and former typographic prodigy Jonathan Hoefler, who designed type for Rolling Stone magazine while still a teenager and who confects the most elaborate typographic descriptions – such as ‘this has that Saturn 5 rocket early NASA quality, but it needs to have that orange plastic Olivetti typewriter, Roman Holiday espresso feeling’.

For the most part Hustwit conducts his interviews in his subjects’ working environments. Carter sits in front of a well-stocked shelf in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Spiekermann swans into a Berlin office peopled with bright young assistants and parks himself under an Ingo Maurer Zettel’z chandelier, and Bierut stands in the New York offices of the Pentagram design consultancy against a backdrop of metal-framed windows overlooking a busy traffic junction.

The best location of all belongs to the most consistent and faithful of Helvetica-using designers: the Italian-born New Yorker Massimo Vignelli. In the late 1960s Vignelli designed the signage system for the New York subway. Extraordinary though it may seem in this digital age, Helvetica was still not available in New York more than ten years after its design in Switzerland, so Vignelli had to make do with the nearest possible alternative. Since then the system has been revised to real Helvetica, and the designer’s faith in the potential of universal, perfect communication survives undimmed.

At the age of 76 Vignelli continues to work from his town house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He receives Hustwit in a high-ceilinged room dominated by an enormous dark-wood-framed, mullioned window. His chair is ergonomic, and the table in front of him is empty but for a paper tray and two perfectly sharpened pencils. Using a single sheet, Vignelli demonstrates that the power of a typeface comes not from the forms of the letters themselves but from the spaces that they frame. It’s hard to imagine a more seductive display of sweetly tempered Minimalism.

Among the younger designers interviewed in the documentary is Michael C. Place, formerly of the talented Sheffield-based graphic design irritants The Designers Republic and now a partner in the London consultancy Build. Interviewed in a less salubrious setting than Vignelli (for some reason he chooses to sit among packing boxes and bubble wrap), he is no less a fan of the order and restraint of the sanserif. His devotion is such that he attempted to insert a note of thanks to the typeface’s ostensible designer, Max Miedinger, in the order of service for his wedding (apparently his wife-to-be was having none of it). Earlier in the film, however, we learn that while the typeface sales clerk Miedinger had drafted the letterforms, the design was created in close collaboration with Eduard Hoffman, the director of the Haas’sche Schriftgießerei foundry in Basel, where he worked. To thank Miedinger without acknowledging Hoffman just wouldn’t be right. It seems that even Helvetica’s keenest admirers can learn something from Hustwit’s film.

Emily King is design editor of frieze.