Old Men and a Typeface

One of the apprentices at the agency brought in Gary Hustwit’s documentary Helvetica—the film, not another monograph—and we watched it together one afternoon. It’s one of those rare design films that makes you actually think rather than just nod.

The structure is loose but effective: the history of the typeface, the designers who built careers around it and still get visibly excited talking about it fifty years on, then the inevitable backlash—a younger generation that finds Helvetica suffocating, the default choice of people who stopped thinking. Both camps make their case well. The old men with their slide rules and their love of clean horizontal terminals are genuinely compelling. So are the younger designers who find the whole thing a straitjacket.

What the film does best is use Helvetica as a lens for something bigger—the relationship between modernism and neutrality, between legibility and personality, between a tool and the ideology baked into it. Is a typeface political? Hustwit doesn’t answer that directly but he makes the question feel urgent, which is more interesting than an answer would be.

I came out of it with complicated feelings about my own use of the thing. It’s everywhere—subway signage, tax forms, the sides of planes. Once you start looking you can’t stop. The film does that to you: it turns Helvetica from wallpaper into something you can’t stop reading.