What Helvetica reveals about pop culture
“It just felt so good to take something that was old, and dusty, and homemade, and crappy-looking, and replace it with Helvetica — like scraping the crud off filthy old things and restoring them to shining beauty” — Michael Bierut, graphic designer
Review of the documentary film Helvetica by Gary Hustwit, 2007
Helvetica is ubiquitous. Helvetica is so commonplace yet so unassuming, easily filtered out of our attention and becomes somewhat invisible. Yet its invisibility does not deny the subconscious effect that it has on our society today, and can be said to be an element in popular culture. In Helvetica (2007), Gary Hustwit takes us on a journey from how the font was created and how it became the dominant font around the Western world, all while interspersing multiple cuts of Helvetica used in a multitude of public settings in multiple cities.
(Aside: It’d be great if I could post the title in Helvetica but Medium doesn’t let me too. Even if it did I probably wouldn’t — I don’t really like Helvetica)
In the parlance of a sociologist, Helvetica is a cultural object, an aspect of everyday living, making up the cultural landscape of everyday life. Cultural objects become ‘lightning rods’ that channel the community’s inner opinions about societal issues into tangible forms that can be openly discussed and contested in the public sphere. People attach subjective and symbolic meanings to cultural objects, even meanings that are far removed from the object’s original, literal form, and base their reactions to these objects on such meanings. One interviewee called Helvetica ‘the font that started the Vietnam War’.
It was fascinating to appreciate that even though Helvetica is an unchanging typeface in its physical form, the font has vastly different meanings to different people — as evidenced by the diverse views of the graphic designers who were interviewed around the same time period. However, more interesting is the fact the meaning ascribed to cultural objects like Helvetica changes over time. During the modernist era of the 1960s, designers who were absolutely drawn to Helvetica’s ‘perfect spacing’, and felt that the font portrayed accessibility, transparency and accountability — making it the perfect font for corporations. One interviewee Michael Bierut even contrasted the ‘shining beauty’ of Helvetica with the ‘old, dusty, crappy and homemade’ fonts that dominated the mainstream in the post-war idealism of the 1950s’. However, with corporations wholeheartedly embracing Helvetica for its branding in the 1960s, the font became associated with corporatism, and has been dubbed ‘the typeface of capitalism’. This association took on a negative slant in the late 1960s, when public sentiment shifted against corporations for their support of the Vietnam War. This was perhaps one of the factors leading to the post-modernist 1970s, which saw a reaction against the dull conformity of Helvetica in the graphic design community, resulting in diverse experimentation with different fonts again.
The film also touches on critical interpretation of pop culture (as opposed to the functionalist and interactionist interpretations in David Grazian’s trichotomy of sociological lenses to viewing pop culture) when it mentions how Helvetica was marshalled en masse by corporations in the 1960s in their logos and advertisements. Helvetica swept into the magazines like a tidal wave, sweeping away the mess of indecipherable cursive fonts in the 50’s ads and leaving a graphical monolith. This illustrates how the profit motive leads corporations to jump onto the bandwagon of what is popular — or well-liked — at a particular cultural moment, with this commercialisation perhaps polluting the essence of culture to some (though this is a topic for a future reflection paper).
Lastly, the film discusses means in which culture is created and propagated, and looks ahead to how technology is democratizing these means of cultural production. In the 1950s the design of typefaces was restricted to type foundries — typefaces had to be designed by hand and templates for individual characters had to be hand-cut in steel. Furthermore, much of written media was centrally-produced, hence the general public were predominantly passive consumers of typeface design choices made by narrow groups of designers and were unable to experiment with fonts of their liking with the ease that I can do now as I type this on Microsoft Word. In this way, decisions of few end up having outsized influence on cultural consumption — the inclusion of Helvetica in the Macintosh by Steve Jobs catalyzed its mass adoption as the default sans-serif font.
With the proliferation of digital technology, some graphic designers on the show predicted that it would spur a democratization of typeface creation. While I agree that this has led to a greater diversity of fonts used as the proportion of user-generated written content we see increases, I note from personal experience that people are mostly choosing from pre-selected options, rather than engaging in the creative process of constructing a typeface from scratch — presumably due to the high time commitment and technical software needed. This means that the Helvetica’s incumbency advantage means that it, and Arial (as its Windows offshoot is more commonly known), still reigns supreme as the default sans serif font in the formal business sphere.
Wim Crouwel summed up the documentary perfectly with his quote that “we are always a child of our time, and we cannot step out of it”. The lasting impression that the documentary left on me is how the pendulum of cultural tastes swings back and forth over different eras. Though today, easy access to cultural products from all eras like movies, music and art means that everyone can appreciate their preferred styles and eras of artistic works, the spotlight of popular culture only shines on a narrow sub-group of the creative spectrum, bestowing disproportionate amounts of fame and financial success on those producers.
References
Boardley, J. (2020, November 02). The last word on helvetica? Retrieved February 04, 2021, from https://ilovetypography.com/2015/06/27/the-last-word-on-helvetica/
Geiger, S. (2011, March 10). Helvetica: A documentary, a history, an anthropology. Retrieved February 04, 2021, from https://stuartgeiger.com/posts/2011/03/helvetica-a-documentary-a-history-an-anthropology/
Lupton, E. (2017, February 20). Documentary “Helvetica” traces the history of typography. Retrieved February 04, 2021, from https://www.metropolismag.com/design/documentary-helvetica-traces-history-typography/
