absolutely sublime or, What I Learned Today

I just had an 50-minute-long intellectual orgasm in the form of the single greatest television program I have ever seen. I fucking TOOK NOTES. It was a PBS "Independent Lens" documentary about typeface, and specifically about Helvetica. I just learned from the internets that it was actually titled, "Helvetica"! (clips) Some of those notes are summarized below. I'm sure this is not quite so revolutionary to anyone who is at all familiar with graphic design.

First of all, people design typefaces. Purposefully, artistically, and imaginatively. One guy in the movie said if he's going to design a typeface, he starts with a lowercase "h" because it gives him horizontal lines and a curve. It tells him how heavy or light and whether there's going to be serifs. Next, he'd put a curvy letter like "o" beside it, and look at the height versus the width of the "o". He'd do p and q because they descend, and b because it ascends. In just a few letters, you have the DNA of the typeface. He would type a few words in the typeface just to see what they "said". Checking out "the experience of reading something".

Apparently, Helvetica was a serious step in typography. I never knew this: It revolutionized the field. One designer: Helvetica is neutral. It got rid of manual differences in hand-carved typefaces. It's really its horizonal terminals that make the difference. Helvetica doesn't have serifs, and every end terminal's (like the tops of I's and h's and the bottoms of p's)'s corners are at horizontal and vertical right angles. Something about the lowercase a's curves, too. Also, and I'm closely paraphrasing a man in the documentary, the interrelationship between positive and negative spaces are such that the negative spaces appear to hold the letters. The letters exist in a "powerful matrix" of white space.

Once it was invented (innovated?) [1957] there was a giant boom of Helvetica advertising. Helvetica "felt" accessible, transparent, and accountable, and many government offices and large corporations used it. Typefaces can elicit a particular emotional response, and the one Helvetica elicits is a balance of push and pull. Someone in the documentary described it as the "typeface of socialism" because it ws available to everybody. If you wrote "Buy jeans." in Helvetica, it says the jeans are clean, you're not going to fit in or stand out. He said those jeans are sold at the GAP.

In the 1970s, there was a reaction against Helvetica. One designer spoke of feeling that, in rejecting the neatness of helvetica, she was overthrowing her mother's "always being clean" motherly oppressions. She associated helvetica with corporations responsible for the Vietnam war, and rebelled against all of that. Other designers wanted freedom from helvetica's "horrible slickness"--they wanted to express their subjective, perhaps irrational selves into their type designs.

A guy said that the qualititative nature of typeface is such that there's no way to describe it except to use things entirely outside it, like describing a typeface as "espresso" or "Debussey".

The '80s was a period of postmodernism: the concern was being reactionary: they wanted to be "not modern"...they were against Helvetica but not necessarily for anything in particular, or in a particular positive direction. There was something called the "grunge period" where type was disorganized and expressive and rallied against Helvetica.

"Just because something is legible doesn't mean it communicates," said one designer. He pointed to the word "caffeinated" in Helvetica and said, "That doesn't say 'caffeinated'!" There's nothing about that that says "caffeinated." A guy said that all something written in Helvetica says is, "Do not read me because I will bore the shit out of you!"

Others believe that Helvetica inherently communicates certain things, and in fact said, "You will do what the typeface wants you to do," meaning Helvetica itself contains a design program. The font ITSELF is a design that resonates only at certain frequencies.

One man said he wished some undiscovered science could prove that there exists in Helvetica some "inherent rightness" about the way it expresses and communicates. You can't improve upon it, he says. It's un-improvable, un-fixable.

Myspace, etc. (and I would add things like blogger), allow people to customize the typefaces of their personal web pages, making it a way to subtlely express yourself. Someone in the documentary said it's something people care about now, like their clothing. This reminds me of handwriting analysis.

Before, I had only had weak inklings of the idea that typeface might be expressive, had to be designed by someone, and conveys things other than the words it comprises. Thanks to this documentary, I feel like I'll be constantly noticing the Helvetica around me. (it's the font of firefox, meijer, target, microsoft, 3M and countless others.) It's a nuance of written language I'd never considered before. AND it's completely relevant to psychology. And art. And Language.

Mostly, I watched the entire documentary with my jaw dropped because I couldn't believe the people in it were serious. They were speaking with such incredible passion about the expressivity of serifs, or the importance of negative space, which are things that I think most people don't ever notice. Ever. Or maybe just I didn't, and that's why it was so mindboggling. Consider my mind blown.