Helvetica

Someone brought the Helvetica documentary to the studio this week and we all crowded around to watch it. It’s this strange thing to sit through when you work in design—watching old men explain why they’re obsessed with a typeface that’s basically everywhere, and then watching it get torn apart by everyone who came after them for being everywhere.

The film doesn’t hide the irony. Helvetica is this perfect, boring, invisible perfection that conquered the world, and depending on who you ask, that’s either the whole achievement or the whole crime. There’s something almost perverse about making a ninety-minute documentary about a font—but the more you listen to the designers talking, the more you get that it’s not really about Helvetica at all. It’s about the moment when modernism stopped being a choice and became the air you breathe.

Younger designers in the film push back hard. They want personality, accident, visible effort. They want you to see the hand that made it. Helvetica is the opposite—it’s supposed to disappear, to let the content speak, to be perfectly neutral. Which sounds great in theory, and maybe it would be if we hadn’t used it for absolutely everything and erased any possibility of anything else.

I can’t decide if the documentary is a defense or an autopsy. Probably both. Either way, it’s worth watching if you think about how things look at all.