h3lv3tic4 rewrite
Oct. 22nd, 2007 03:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dubdobdeeThe typeface known as Helvetica since 1960 -- originally Neue Haas Grotesk -- was created in Switzerland in 1957 by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. Interviewing design historians, designers and key figures in the type industry -- including Massimo Vignelli, Wim Crouwel, Hermann Zapf, Neville Brody, Raygun’s David Carson and Rick Poynor -- the documentary explains Helvetica’s genesis and rise to prominence, in reference to corporate, consumer and wider social and political needs in the 50s and 60s. Alongside countless examples of its use, old and new, in print and on posters, signage and packaging, we learn how and why the successor generation of designers reacted against its pre-eminence in the 70s and 80s, and then, more recently, as fashion has turned again, the manner in which it has been returning to favour.
Review:
There was a joke at Sight and Sound of old, that the designer was holding up the layouts because he needed to “kern the folios” -- that’s to say, he was re-calibrating the space between the numerals informing us what page we’re on. See for yourself how needful a task this might be -- and welcome to the micropolitics of the division of labour in the print-based communications industry, where what the words say is only a part of where brain-time is spent. Helvetica is a san serif typeface -- like the credit matter below, rather than this sentence, it lacks those little spikes at letter-ends -- and what’s lovely about this documentarys is that it not only gets across the passions, absurd and detailed, that shape this world, passions about effects few of us can name and some never notice at all, but also sketches a timeline in changing technologies and fashions over a half-century. Not only does it map the triumph of 50s functional modernism, reactions and counter-reactions, it very elegantly summarises much of what was various felt to be at stake, in the decades that followed. Helvetica swept out of Switzerland to fuse with the zeitgeist: in Europe, it established or rebuilt social responsibility, cutting a sane (or anyway legible) swathe through the thickets of the Gothic typeface, that dense and spiny symbol of Nazi officialdom; in the US, it was a dynamic managerialist Now driving twee generations of amateur-hour mom-and-pop adverts off the magazine pages. was a price paid for its success?
Introductory and concluding talking heads commentary brackets a chronological middle section: the first designers to embrace on say why, while participants tell how the face was developed at the Haas foundry; then successors down the decades chime in, all intercut with a blizzard of examples, low, high, straight and strange, from billboards to badges, CDs to WCs. Thus veterans defend their patch with gravitas and silky menace, against engagé hippies, try-anything post-punkers, faux-naif post-everything nu-fogeys. The perhaps slightly pat broad sociology of design this seems to sketch, from pre-modern chaos to corporate grid-form monolithicity to directionless computer-led cultural democracy, gradually becomes a torrent of obsession, a flow of subjective disagreements bordering on lunacy -- Massimo Vignelli declares Helvetica a cure for disease, visual and mental; Paula Scher serenely blames it for the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Why’s it everywhere? Because of its invisibility (you can use it for anything ), or because of its neutrality (you can project anything onto it), or because bad taste is after all ubiquitous. It’s reassuring! But it’s boring! But it’s unimprovable! And now it’s in our blood! History comes to an end when choosing either side is meaningless...
At one point, design historian Rick Poynor -- deployed as the voice of common-sense overview -- uses the word “subliminal”, casually referencing a long-banned technique, vanishingly brief messages flashed up in adverts; design, the implication is, bypasses our conscious awareness with its non-verbal filigree, hence its hold on us, its importance and its perils. Thus are we hipped to the secret conviction of all designers, as the film slyly hints; that THEY are the unacknowledged legislator; that it isn’t the WORDS at all, which agitate your brain or soul, but the shape of white space between them. When type-designer Mike Parker delightedly sums up what Helvetica means to him, it’s as “the figure-ground relationship properly executed” -- and nothing has been as hot since. Nothing? Division of labour; division of perspective?
Quantity becomes quality, said old man Hegel -- times a million, the harmless raindrop is a typhoon; multiplied on all sides, austerely minimalist signage becomes an oppressive fug; an army of wacky individualisms becomes a clutter of stasis. All the minute typographical effects combine to create a (potentially unexpected) context of atmosphere; all our responses one by one combine to create a context of mass attitude, sometimes just as contrary. Here’s a neat example: subliminals -- the hidden persuader that made the difference -- actually entered cultural consciousness via a brilliantly effective 50s salespitch that backfired, for an utterly bogus technique. The figures that proved its efficacy were faked; but outrage and ban created a household word, a meme of a concept, the scam at its heart undiscovered for decades.
Similarly, much of the chatter here, pro or con, is politics as flimsy handwaving: “modernism” bolsters rationality or cohesion, “pomo” offers easyreach social revolt. We’re watching (doubtless) front-rank designers flexing (doubtless) sincere beliefs to promote their (doubtless) excellent wares: hire me, here’s my simpatico sensibility What’s at issue isn’t left v right, conservative v radical, creativity v conformity, but the oldest war of all, tidiness v mess.
Meanwhile, this film’s own likeably memorable voice -- a voice with the oomph of neat selective clarity -- gets itself in everyone’s heads. As more and more people learn to declare themselves by the pages they lay out on-line, self-taught visual literacy reaching critical mass as a babel of unschooled accents, the presence of this well-told story, a dynamic argument-shape become shared social fact, ensures fashion can’t just slump back into its eternal to-and-fro. So history doesn’t end after all -- and all because we now know why it matters to kern the folios (or not).
Review:
There was a joke at Sight and Sound of old, that the designer was holding up the layouts because he needed to “kern the folios” -- that’s to say, he was re-calibrating the space between the numerals informing us what page we’re on. See for yourself how needful a task this might be -- and welcome to the micropolitics of the division of labour in the print-based communications industry, where what the words say is only a part of where brain-time is spent. Helvetica is a san serif typeface -- like the credit matter below, rather than this sentence, it lacks those little spikes at letter-ends -- and what’s lovely about this documentarys is that it not only gets across the passions, absurd and detailed, that shape this world, passions about effects few of us can name and some never notice at all, but also sketches a timeline in changing technologies and fashions over a half-century. Not only does it map the triumph of 50s functional modernism, reactions and counter-reactions, it very elegantly summarises much of what was various felt to be at stake, in the decades that followed. Helvetica swept out of Switzerland to fuse with the zeitgeist: in Europe, it established or rebuilt social responsibility, cutting a sane (or anyway legible) swathe through the thickets of the Gothic typeface, that dense and spiny symbol of Nazi officialdom; in the US, it was a dynamic managerialist Now driving twee generations of amateur-hour mom-and-pop adverts off the magazine pages. was a price paid for its success?
Introductory and concluding talking heads commentary brackets a chronological middle section: the first designers to embrace on say why, while participants tell how the face was developed at the Haas foundry; then successors down the decades chime in, all intercut with a blizzard of examples, low, high, straight and strange, from billboards to badges, CDs to WCs. Thus veterans defend their patch with gravitas and silky menace, against engagé hippies, try-anything post-punkers, faux-naif post-everything nu-fogeys. The perhaps slightly pat broad sociology of design this seems to sketch, from pre-modern chaos to corporate grid-form monolithicity to directionless computer-led cultural democracy, gradually becomes a torrent of obsession, a flow of subjective disagreements bordering on lunacy -- Massimo Vignelli declares Helvetica a cure for disease, visual and mental; Paula Scher serenely blames it for the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Why’s it everywhere? Because of its invisibility (you can use it for anything ), or because of its neutrality (you can project anything onto it), or because bad taste is after all ubiquitous. It’s reassuring! But it’s boring! But it’s unimprovable! And now it’s in our blood! History comes to an end when choosing either side is meaningless...
At one point, design historian Rick Poynor -- deployed as the voice of common-sense overview -- uses the word “subliminal”, casually referencing a long-banned technique, vanishingly brief messages flashed up in adverts; design, the implication is, bypasses our conscious awareness with its non-verbal filigree, hence its hold on us, its importance and its perils. Thus are we hipped to the secret conviction of all designers, as the film slyly hints; that THEY are the unacknowledged legislator; that it isn’t the WORDS at all, which agitate your brain or soul, but the shape of white space between them. When type-designer Mike Parker delightedly sums up what Helvetica means to him, it’s as “the figure-ground relationship properly executed” -- and nothing has been as hot since. Nothing? Division of labour; division of perspective?
Quantity becomes quality, said old man Hegel -- times a million, the harmless raindrop is a typhoon; multiplied on all sides, austerely minimalist signage becomes an oppressive fug; an army of wacky individualisms becomes a clutter of stasis. All the minute typographical effects combine to create a (potentially unexpected) context of atmosphere; all our responses one by one combine to create a context of mass attitude, sometimes just as contrary. Here’s a neat example: subliminals -- the hidden persuader that made the difference -- actually entered cultural consciousness via a brilliantly effective 50s salespitch that backfired, for an utterly bogus technique. The figures that proved its efficacy were faked; but outrage and ban created a household word, a meme of a concept, the scam at its heart undiscovered for decades.
Similarly, much of the chatter here, pro or con, is politics as flimsy handwaving: “modernism” bolsters rationality or cohesion, “pomo” offers easyreach social revolt. We’re watching (doubtless) front-rank designers flexing (doubtless) sincere beliefs to promote their (doubtless) excellent wares: hire me, here’s my simpatico sensibility What’s at issue isn’t left v right, conservative v radical, creativity v conformity, but the oldest war of all, tidiness v mess.
Meanwhile, this film’s own likeably memorable voice -- a voice with the oomph of neat selective clarity -- gets itself in everyone’s heads. As more and more people learn to declare themselves by the pages they lay out on-line, self-taught visual literacy reaching critical mass as a babel of unschooled accents, the presence of this well-told story, a dynamic argument-shape become shared social fact, ensures fashion can’t just slump back into its eternal to-and-fro. So history doesn’t end after all -- and all because we now know why it matters to kern the folios (or not).
