Helvetica

Besides providing a wonderful cast of famous typographers, the film Helvetica was an interesting chance to take a look at myself as a designer. Throughout much of the film I found myself struggling to choose sides on what seemed like a foreboding issue of graphic design: to use or not to use Helvetica. As the cast of the film eloquently gave their personal reasonings, I was caught in a pull back and forth. I distinctly remember not using Helvetica as a child because it came up as the default on my Macintosh. But after the film, I found myself just simply typing words over and over in the font, noticing Helvetica all around me, and later trying to draw it's letters, all in attempt to discover its inherent virtuosity over so many other typefaces - a feeling portrayed very well in the film.

I was also reminded of an instance when I was tracing letters from Helvetica for our project 2 compositions. A friend picked up the piece of paper with the entire typeface on it and then very bluntly stated, "Why the hell are you using this font?" I replied, "Because it's the most popular font in the world." This came as even more of a shock to them and they recounted, "Popular or not, that is the most boring font I have ever seen." This seems to be the mystery behind Helvetica. Why does it work so well in so many instances of communication but look so boring as an alphabet? Maybe it stems from being the perfect modern font, or having great symmetry within the letterforms, but all in all the helvetica's "a" is the letter a. The capital "G" is the letter G and you can't mistake it for anything else. Whatever the answer is, it just works. And like it or not, my above-all eventual job as a graphic designer is going to be to make things work.