Helvetica (2007) - full transcript

Type is saying things to us all the time.

Typefaces express a mood,
an atmosphere,

they give words a certain coloring.

Everywhere you look, you see typefaces.

But there's probably one you see more
than any other one, and that's Helvetica.

You know, there it is, and it just seems to
come from nowhere.

lt seems like air, it seems like gravity.

lt's hard to evaluate it,

it's like being asked what you think about
off-white paint,

it's just, there.

lt's hard to get your head around
something that big.



Most people who use Helvetica use it
because it's ubiquitous.

lt's like going to McDonalds instead of
thinking about food.

Because it's there, it's on every street
corner.

So let's eat crap, because it's on the
corner.

For me, Helvetica's just this beautiful,
timeless thing.

And certain things shouldn't be messed
with, you know?

Graphic design is the communication
framework,

through which these messages, about
what the world is now

and what we should aspire to,

it's the way they reach us.

The designer has an enormous
responsibility,

those are the people putting their wires
into our heads.

Now should l talk? Should l not talk?

You want me to say something?



Say something, say nothing?

The life of a designer is a life of fight:

fight against the ugliness.

Just like a doctor fights against disease.

For us, the visual disease is what we have
around,

and what we try to do is to cure it
somehow, with design.

A good typographer always has sensitivity
about the distance between the letters.

We think typography is black and white.

Typography is really white, it's not even
black.

lt is the space between the blacks that
really makes it.

ln a sense it's like music,

it's not the notes, it's the space you put
between the notes that makes the music.

For instance, we designed the corporate
identity for American Airlines.

This was done in 1966,

and the novelty at the time was the fact of
making one word instead of two

American Airlines by making
AmericanAirlines all one word,

half red and half blue, just separated
by the color.

What could me more American than red
and blue? You know, so it's perfect.

lt's the only airline in the last forty years
that has

not changed their identity.

All the airlines coming and going and
changing... American Airlines is still the
same. There's no need to change,

and how can they improve it?

They got the best already: American
Airlines in Helvetica.

We always had a tendency to use
very few typefaces.

lt's not that we don't believe in type.

We believe there are not that many
good typefaces.

lf l want to be really generous
there's a dozen,

basically l use no more than three.

There are people that think that type
should be expressive.

They have a different point of view
than mine.

l don't think type should be
expressive at all.

l can write the word 'dog' with any typeface

and it doesn't have to look like a dog.

But there are people that think when they
write 'dog' it should bark!

What Helvetica is: it's a typeface that was
generated

by a desire of having better legibility.

lt is a modern type. lt is a very clear type.

lt's good for everything, pretty much.

You can say l love you in Helvetica.

And you can say it with Helvetica Extra
Light if you want to be really fancy.

Or you can say it in Extra Bold if it's really
intensive and passionate,

and it might work.

You can also say l hate you.

l can write . . . l certainly can write a few
letters in Helvetica saying that . . .

to Washington D.C. in particular,
if l can put it that way.

When Helvetica came about, we were all
ready for it.

lt just had all the right connotations we
were looking for,

for anything that had to spell out
loud and clear: modern.

The 1950s is an interesting period in the
development of graphic design.

ln that postwar period,

after the horror and the cataclysm of the
Second World War,

there's a real feeling of idealism among
some designers, many perhaps,

across the world, certainly in Europe,

that design is part of that need to rebuild,
to reconstruct,

to make things more open,

make them run more smoothly, be more
democratic.

There was this real sense of social
responsibility among designers.

And this is the period when the early
experiments of the high Modernist period

start to be broken down, rationalized,
codified,

you get the emergence of this so-called
international typographic style

or Swiss style.

And it's Swiss designers in the 1950s who
are really driving that along.

This is where Helvetica comes in.

Helvetica emerges in that period, in 1 957,

where there's felt to be a need for rational
typefaces

which can be applied to all kinds of
contemporary information,

whether it's sign systems or corporate
identity

and present those visual expressions of
the modern world to the public

in an intelligible, legible way.

So, it's underpinned, is what l'm saying

by this great feeling shared by many
designers of idealism.

l'm a Modernist, you know.

l was trained in that period,

l lived in that period. l love Modernism.

l go next week to London to see the
exhibition of Modernism.

l want it, you know.

And well, that's my life.

l'm surrounded with furniture from that
period. l can't change myself any more.

But if l see today designers, they use all
typefaces-one day one typeface,

the other day the other typeface, all in
favor of a certain atmosphere,

l'm not . . . l don't like that.

l'm always interested in clarity.

lt should be clear,

it should be readable, it should be
straightforward.

So l started using, gradually, grids for my
design,

for my catalogues for museums.

l invented a grid, and within the grid

l played my game.

But always along the lines of the grid,

so that there is a certain order in it.

That's why l use grids,

that's why they call me ''Gridnik.''

For me, it's a tool of creating order,

and creating order is typography.

l started late with the computer.

l think it was in 1993 that l bought my first
computer

and l learned myself and l can handle it
now quite well

but not like the young people.

l am slow with it and l can do it.

But l'm very much interested and

l would have liked to have in the sixties the
computer

because we can speed up our work, we
can do it so much better,

and especially all the layers you can bring
into your work.

We had the greatest problem in the sixties
to bring two or three layers into the work.

You need to do it by photograph, you did all
kinds of crazy techniques

and working on a poster took us days.

And now within half an hour you have your
ideas and you can make variations

and make a good choice.

You can't do better design with a computer,

but you can speed up your work
enormously.

Shall l begin?

l made these post stamps on the Stijl
movement.

ln the beginning, if you see the sketches,

l tried to use typefaces from van Doesburg,
one of the artists of the Stijl movement.

Then l decided for the final designs

not to use these typefaces because the
illustration is already from that period,

and l used the most neutral typeface-
Helvetica.

Helvetica was a real step from the
nineteenth-century typefaces.

lt was a little more machined,

it was doing away with these manual
details in it,

and we were impressed by that, because it
was more neutral.

And neutralism was a word that we loved.

lt should be neutral;

it shouldn't have a meaning in itself. lt
should . . .

the meaning is in the content of the text,
not in the typeface.

That's why we loved Helvetica very much.

l have to say that for a lot of my life

l rather dreaded the moment of having to
explain to someone...

you know, you find yourself sitting next to
some nice person on a plane

or a train and they ask you sooner or later
what you do

and if you say type designer, they
generally look completely blank.

Occasionally, someone will actually know
the term

but then will say, ''l thought they were all
dead.''

Since l did some work for Microsoft in the
mid-nineties on screen fonts,

particularly Verdana and Georgia,

l've had quite comical encounters with
people who will say,

''Oh, you work with fonts.

We just got this memo round the office
saying we've all got to start using
something called Verdana.

Have you ever heard of it?''

Funny conversations that never would
have happened to me

thirty, forty years ago.

My dad was a typographer, and although
he didn't push me to follow in his footsteps

when l left school, high school in the UK, l
had a year to fill before going to university

and l got sent as a trainee, an unpaid
trainee, intern,

to a type foundry in the Netherlands,

where l spent a year learning what turned
out to be a completely obsolete trade

of making type by hand.

lt was a matter of cutting letters in steel,
engraving them at actual size.

You know, l doubt if l ever got up quite to
one letter a day at that time.

So, you know, l could say that really l've
made type by practically all the means

it's ever been made in the fifty, fifty-one
years that l've been working.

lt's hard to generalize about the way type
designers work.

There isn't a generality of us.

But l think that most type designers if they
were sitting in this chair

would essentially start in much the same
way.

l'd probably start with a lowercase h.

it tells me, first of all, whether this is a sans
serif or a serif typeface.

lf it were a serif face it would look like this

here are the serifs so called, these little
feet

on the bottom and top of the principal
strokes of the letter.

Are they heavy, are they light, what is the
nature of the serif,

is there a lot of thick-thin contrast in the
letter form;

what are the proportions of the overall
height, the ascender, so-called of the h,

and the x-height part of it,

Then because an h is a straight-sided
letter,

l would then do a round letter like an o
along side it.

l can get a sense of how the weight of the
curved part of the o relates to the straight
part of the h.

And already there is a huge amount of
DNA is just a couple of letterforms like that.

l'd then probably do something like a
lowercase p

because it's half straight and half round;

and also it has a descending stroke,

which is another vertical dimension that l
would be interested in establishing.

Then l would then build on that.

lf you've got an h you've got an awful lot of
information

about m, n, and u in the lower case.

lf you've got a p you've got q and b and d
and so on.

And then just as soon as possible l would
get them into words

or something that looked like words

because for me the experience of reading
something is so critical in judging it as a
typeface

because l find that is the acid test of how a
typeface performs.

One of the most characteristic and to my
mind beautiful things about Helvetica

is these horizontal terminals, you see in the
lower case a and c and e and g.

The whole structure is based on this
horizontal slicing off of the terminals.

It's very hard for a designer to look at these
characters and say,

how would l improve them? How would l
make them any different?

They just seem to be exactly right.

l'm glad no one asked me to

second-guess Helvetica

because l wouldn't know what to do.

This is the original type specimen of
Helvetica

before it was Helvetica. lt had its original
name, Die Neue Haas Grotesk.

The whole story of how Helvetica came
into being

is not entirely clear, at least to me.

lt is said, and l think it's true,

that Eduard Hoffmann, who had been the
boss at Haas type foundry,

wished to make a modernized version of
Akzidenz Grotesk,

which was essentially a traditional
nineteenth-century German sans serif,

and his method of doing that was sort of to
clean it up and so on.

And it was of course Max Miedinger who
made the drawings for Helvetica.

l received the impression from people l
knew back in the sixties and seventies

that Hoffmann's part in this was a very
much more significant one

than you might just assume by reading in a
textbook

that Max Miedinger was the designer of
Helvetica.

You can easily say this was a joint product

of both Miedinger and my father.

Miedinger couldn't produce a typeface
alone;

neither could my father.

But when both were working hard together
then something good resulted.

Here are the first trials of Neue Haas
Grotesk,

which was the first name of Helvetica.

l knew the way things worked at Haas

and l had gradually picked up on the
importance of Eduard Hoffman,

and his almost pathological shyness

and the way that he would use other
people's hands.

But boy could you see his mind at work on
the faces

where he was deeply involved.

You have here a note by Eduard Hoffmann

indicating all the desired corrections.

''The capital Y is too slim.

The capital A is also too slim.''

When you talk about the design of Haas
Neue Grotesk or Helvetica,

what it's all about is the interrelationship of
the negative shape

the figure-ground relationship,

the shapes between characters and within
characters,

with the black if you like, with the inked
surface.

And the Swiss pay more attention to the
background,

so that the counters and the space
between characters just hold the letters.

l mean you can't imagine anything moving;

it is so firm.

lt's not a letter that's bent to shape;

it's a letter that lives in a powerful matrix of
surrounding space.

lt's . . . oh it's brilliant when it's done well.

My father had clear ideas

how the typeface should look.

So my father and Miedinger sat together,
and he started drawing.

Here you have a proof of an alphabet

with observations by Max Miedinger.

When Miedinger worked for Haas he did
not work as a designer.

He was actually a salesman.

His job was to travel around Switzerland

taking orders for fonts of type.

By profession he was a graphic artist,

but he realized that he could make more
money by selling foundry type.

But my father said, lf ever l have an idea of
a new typeface, l'm sure that you could
design it.

l have here a type specimen book

of both type foundries, Stempel and Haas.

You have to know that Haas was
controlled by the German type foundry
Stempel.

And in turn Stempel was also controlled by
Linotype.

Now we go down to the cellar and see in
our archives where we can find Helvetica.

Here we have number 24.

And there it is, the Helvetica drawings.

The marketing director at Stempel had the
idea to give it a better name

because Neue Haas Grotesk didn't sound
very good for a

typeface that was intended to be sold in
the United States.

Stempel suggested the name of Helvetia.

This is very important: Helvetia is the Latin
name of Switzerland.

My father said, That's impossible.

You cannot call a typeface after the name
of a country.

So he said, why don't you call it Helvetica.

So in other words this would be the Swiss
typeface.

And they agreed.

l think Helvetica was a perfect name at the
time.

Swiss typography at that time

was well-known worldwide.

So it was the best solution for Helvetica

to get into the market.

Once we'd introduced Helvetica, it really
ran away.

lt was exactly what the designers were
looking for.

l mean, l don't think there's been such a
hot thing since

as the figure-ground relationship properly
executed

and it was. . . oh, just a landslide waiting to
go down the mountain.

And away it went.

l imagine there was a time when it just felt
so good

to take something that was old and dusty
and homemade and crappy looking

and replace it with Helvetica.

lt just must have felt like you were scraping
the crud off of like filthy old things

and restoring them to shining beauty. And
in fact

corporate identity in the sixties, that's what
it sort of consisted of.

Clients would come in and they'd have
piles of goofy old brochures from the fifties

that hide like shapes on them and goofy
bad photographs.

They'd have some letterhead that would
say Amalgamated Widget on the top

in some goofy, maybe a script typeface,
above Amalgamated Widget

it would have an engraving showing their
headquarters

in Paducah, lowa, with smokestacks
belching smoke

you know, and then you go to a corporate
identity consultant circa 1 965, 1966,

and they would take that and lay it here
and say, Here's your current stationery,

and all it implies, and this is what we're
proposing.

And next to that, next to the belching
smokestacks and

the nuptial script and the ivory paper,

they'd have a crisp bright white piece of
paper

and instead of Amalgamated Widget,
founded 1 857,

it just would say Widgco, in Helvetica
Medium

Can you imagine how bracing and thrilling
that was?

That must have seemed like you'd crawled
through a desert

with your mouth just caked with filthy dust

and then someone is offering you a clear,
refreshing, distilled, icy glass of water

to clear away all this horrible, kind of like,
burden of history.

lt must have been just fantastic. And you
know it must have been fantastic

because it was done over and over and
over again.

So this is what l'm talking about, this is Life
Magazine 1 953.

One ad after another in here, that just kind
of shows every single visual bad habit that
was endemic in those days.

You've got zany hand lettering everywhere,

swash typography to signify elegance,

exclamation points, exclamation points,
exclamation points.

Cursive wedding invitation typography
down here reading,

''Almost everyone appreciates the best.''

This was everywhere in the Fifties, this is
how everything looked in the Fifties.

You cut to - this is after Helvetica was in
full swing - same product.

No people, no smiling fakery,

just a beautiful big glass of ice-cold Coke.

The slogan underneath: lt's the Real Thing,

period.

Coke, period.

Punkt.

ln Helvetica, period.

Any questions? Of course not. Drink Coke,
period.

Simple.

Governments and corporations love
Helvetica

because on one hand it makes them seem
neutral and efficient,

but also the smoothness of the letters
makes them seem almost human.

That is a quality they all want to convey

because of course they have the image
they are always fighting

that they are authoritarian they're
bureaucratic,

you lose yourself in them, they're
oppressive.

So instead, by using Helvetica

they can come off seeming more
accessible, transparent, and accountable,

which are all the buzzwords for what
corporations

and governments are supposed to be
today.

Now they don't have to be accessible or
accountable or transparent

but they can look that way.

Our tax forms from the lRS are in
Helvetica.

The EPA uses it

now there's someone who wants to look
clean and official and efficient.

Designers, and l think even readers, invest
so much of the surroundings in the
typeface.

American Apparel uses Helvetica and it
looks cheeky.

American Airlines uses it and it looks
sober.

And it's not just a matter of the weight they
use and the letter spacing and the colors.

There's something about the typeface l
think really invites this sort of open
interpretation.

l suppose you could say the typefaces are
either

those that are fully open to interpretation

or merely have one association attached to
them.

A typeface made of icicles or candy canes
or something just says one thing.

And Helvetica maybe says everything.

And that's perhaps part of its appeal.

Typography has this real poverty of terms
to describe things.

Beyond x height and cap height and weight
and so on.

l find when Tobias and l work on projects
together

we tend to use a lot of qualitative terms
that are entirely subjective.

Working on the typeface for Esquire years
ago, l remember us saying,

l remember my saying, No this has that
Saturn 5 rocket early NASA quality.

lt needs to have that orange plastic Olivetti
typewriter, Roman Holiday espresso
feeling.

l know you got exactly what l was saying.
-l did. -

But it's that there's really no way to
describe the qualitative parts

of a typeface without resorting to things are
fully outside it.

And we're constantly saying, You know,
this has that, it feels kind of Erik Satie;

it needs to be Debussy.

Or this has a kind of belt and suspenders
look.

lt needs to be, you know, much more
elegant. . . hand-lasted shoe.

l've been collecting these signs for a
couple of years now

and one of my favorites is these signs. l
have a number of these.

This is what the street signs in New York
City used to look like.

This actually functions so much more
clearly

and so much more effectively than what we
see out on the street now.

The sort of classical modernist line on

how aware a reader should be of a
typeface

is that they shouldn't be aware of it at all.

lt should be this crystal goblet

there to just hold and display and organize

the information. But l don't think it's really
quite as simple as that.

l think even if they're not consciously

aware of the typeface they're reading,
they'll certainly be affected by it.

The same way that an actor that's miscast
in a role will affect someone's experience

of a movie or play that they're watching.
They'll still follow the plot,

but, you know, be less convinced or
excited or affected.

l think that typography is similar to that,

where the designer choosing typefaces is
essentially a casting director.

There's very little type in my world outside
of work.

Like everybody else l'm aware of fonts
being used in my environment.

You know, the standing joke that graphic
designers can't see historical movies

because the fonts are always wrong is
certainly true.

lt definitely makes the world outside the
office very different.

My fiancé and l were trying to remember
the location of a restaurant

in our neighborhood, and she remembered
it as that new place

that's just a couple blocks down from the
dry cleaner.

l remembered it as that new place just a
couple blocks down from

the place with the bad letter spacing out
front.

Nobody doesn't know what Helvetica is,

l mean, at the beginning of our careers
certainly before anybody had a PC or a
Mac,

no one knew what fonts were.

l think even then people might have known
what Helvetica was.

The fact that it's been so heavily licensed

and made available through these very
populist technologies

has kind of furthered the mythology that it's
the ultimate typeface in some way.

And even for us professionals that's hard
to escape from.

l kind of find myself buying into the idea

that ''Oh, the sans serif evolved for a
hundred years

and the ultimate expression was
Helvetica.''

And realizing, wait a minute that's not quite
true, historically

or aesthetically or culturally or politically.

But there's something about it that does
the feeling of finality to it,

the conclusion of one line of reasoning was
this typeface,

and perhaps everything after it is
secondary in some way.

l'm obviously a typomaniac, which is an
incurable, if not mortal, disease.

l can't explain it l just love, l just like
looking at type,

l just get a total kick out of it. They are my
friends.

Other people look at bottles of wine or
whatever, or girls' bottoms,

l get kicks out of looking at type.

lt's a little worrying l must admit, it's a very
nerdish thing to do.

l'm very much a word person.

So that's why typography for me is the
obvious extension.

lt just makes my words visible.

A real typeface needs rhythm, needs
contrast; it comes from handwriting.

That's why l can read your handwriting,
and you can read mine.

And l'm sure our handwriting is miles away
from Helvetica

or anything that would be considered
legible.

But we can read it because there's a
rhythm to it, there's a contrast to it.

Helvetica hasn't got any of that.

|Why is it fifty years later still so popular?|

l don't know. What is bad taste ubiquitous?

No, actually, Helvetica was a good
typeface at the time.

lt really answered a demand.

But now it's become one of those defaults
that,

partly because of the proliferation of the
computer, which is now twenty years,

the PC l mean,

it was the default on the Apple Macintosh
and then it became the default on Windows

which copied everything that Apple did, as
you know.

lnterface and everything else, and then
they did the clone version, Arial,

which is worse than Helvetica but

fills the same purpose l think. Now it's
probably never going to go away

because it's ubiquitous; it's a default. lt's
air,

you know, it's just there. There's no choice.

You have to breathe, so you have to use
Helvetica.

lt brings style with it; every typeface does.

lt has a certain,

well, it's like a person, if you are slightly
heavy in the middle

you're not going to walk around in tight T-
shirts. You'd look like an idiot.

And Helvetica is heavy in the middle. So it
has a certain,

it needs certain space around it, needs a
lot of white space;

it needs very carefully to be looked at the
weight gradations.

lt needs a lot of space sideways also.

Then it's very legible, but

very small and very tightly done and very
lightly as modern designers do,

it's a nightmare, a total nightmare.

l wouldn't say this if l hadn't tried it.

Because all the letters . . . it's the whole
Swiss ideology;

the guy who designed it tried to make all
the letters look the same.

Hello??? You know, that's called an army.
That's not people.

That's people having the same fucking
helmet on.

lt doesn't further individualism.

And the aim with type design always is to
make it individual enough

so that it's interesting,

but of course ninety-five percent of any
alphabet has to look like the other alphabet

otherwise you wouldn't be able to read it.

l've never sort of woken up with a typeface
coming out,

you know, like some people . . . l've got to
do this, and they go to their,

whatever, their easel, and these amazing
brush strokes.

l don't have that urge.

You know, l wake up and usually l want to
go back to sleep.

l mean, everybody puts their history into
their work.

l certainly know that when l draw
something it has

l'm fast, l'm loud, l'm chaotic,

l'm not very rule based, even though l'm
German and l love rules,

l'm a Gemini, l had my birthday yesterday,
so l'm all over the place essentially.

l'm always on time, but a year late, you
know what l mean,

but then l'm on the second.

So l have this horrible thing, which comes
out in my typefaces.

They're never perfect. They always have a
little edge

in the sense that l leave them alone when l
get bored with them.

l know there's people who hate me, who
would never use one of my typefaces in a
million years

and vice versa, people who would use any
typeface l design

not because it's good for them or it fits the
purpose,

simply because l did it.

l think we all do that. Certain bands l buy
every CD from them;

some of them are crap.

But l buy it because l've always bought
their CDs

lch habe sie immer gekauft,

or their music.

Why do people buy certain things? The
brand rubs off on them.

And typefaces are a brand.

You're telling an audience, This is for you,
by using a certain typographic voice.

You'd recognize a Marlboro brand two
miles away

because they use a typeface that they only
use

You can buy it; l have it; anyone can, it's
called Neo Contact. Anybody can buy it,

but Marlboro have made the typeface
theirs.

You can recognize any Marlboro ad from
miles away

because of that stupid typeface.

lf they'd used Helvetica. . . Hello??? lt
wouldn't quite work.

The way something is presented will define
the way you react to it.

So you can take the same message and
present it in three different typefaces,

and the response to that, the immediate
emotional response will be different.

And the choice of typeface is the prime
weapon,

if you want, in that communication.

And l say weapon largely because with
commercial marketing and advertising,

the way a message is dressed is going to
define our reaction to that message in the
advertising.

So if it says, buy these jeans, and it's a
grunge font,

you would expect it to be some kind of
ripped jeans

or to be sold in some kind of underground
clothing store.

lf you see that same message in Helvetica,

you know, it's probably on sale at Gap.

You know it's going to be clean, that you're
going to fit in, you're not going to stand out.

All of us, l would suggest, are prompted in
subliminal ways.

Maybe the feeling you have when you see
a particular typographic choices used on a
piece of packaging,

is just, l like the look of that, that feels
good, that's my kind of product.

But that's the type casting its secret spell.

ln a way, Helvetica is a club. lt's a mark of
membership;

it's a badge that says we're part of modern
society,

we share the same ideals.

lt's well-rounded, it's not going to be
damaging or dangerous.

Helvetica has almost like a perfect balance
of push and pull in its letters,

and that perfect balance sort of is saying to
us,

well not sort of, it is saying to us,

Don't worry, any of the problems you're
having, or problems in the world,

or problems getting through the subway or
finding a bathroom,

all those problems aren't going to spill over,
they'll be contained,

and in fact maybe they don't exist.

What l like is if this very serious typeface

tells you the do's and don'ts of street life,

and it must be Helvetica at that moment.

The image of Helvetica as the corporate
typeface

made it the so-called typeface of
capitalism,

which l would actually reject and say

it's the typeface of socialism

because it is available all over and it's
inviting dilettantes and amateurs and

everybody to do typography,

to create their own type designs, and l
think that's a good thing.

And l think l'm right calling Helvetica the
perfume of the city.

lt's just something we don't notice usually

but we would miss very much if it wouldn't
be there.

l think it's quite amazing that a typeface
can advance to such a status

in our lives

As is always the case with any style,
there's a law of diminishing returns.

The more you see it, the more the public
sees it,

the more the designer uses those
typographic and graphic solutions,

the more familiar, predictable, and
ultimately dull they become.

By the time l started as a designer, it sort
of seemed there was only one trick in town,

which was like, what can you use instead
of Helvetica.

You know, ABH, Anything But Helvetica.

And you do need lot of sans serif
typefaces,

but it seemed like Helvetica had just been
used so much and overused so much

and associated with so many big, faceless
things

that it had lost all its capacity even, to my
eyes at least, to look nice.

And by the seventies, especially in
America,

you start to get a reaction against,

what it seems to those designers is the
conformity,

the kind of dull blanket of sameness

that this way of designing is imposing on
the world.

So something that had come out of
idealism

has by this time become merely routine,
and there's a need for a change.

You come into design,

at the point that you start out in history,

without knowing that you're starting out in
history,

and often you don't have a sense of what
came before you and how it got there,

and you certainly don't know what's going
to come after.

And when l walked into design as a
student at Tyler School of Art,

what struck me was sort of two separate
cultures of design.

One was the corporate culture,

and the corporate culture was the visual
language of big corporations,

and at that time they were persuasively
Helvetica.

They looked alike, they looked a little
fascistic to me.

They were clean, it reminded me of
cleaning up your room.

l felt like, this was some conspiracy of my
mother's, to make me keep the house
clean,

that all my messy room adolescent
rebellion was coming back at me

in the form of Helvetica, and l had to
overthrow it.

Hey, l got some printouts of the stuff from
last night.

l also was morally opposed to Helvetica,

because l viewed the big corporations that
were slathered in Helvetica

as sponsors of the Vietnam War.

So therefore, if you used Helvetica,

it meant that you were in favor of the
Vietnam War,

so how could you use it?

What looked cool to me at that point were
record album covers, Zig-Zag rolling
papers,

the accoutrements of dope life and
counterculture,

obviously underground newspapers and
magazines, and Pushpin Studios.

Pushpin Studios was the height of, at the
time l was in college,

everybody's ambition. To work there, to do
work that was as inspiring as their work,

because it seemed fresh and alive and
witty and content-laden,

aside from the fact that Seymour Chwast
and Milton Glazer could really draw.

And l wanted to make work that looked like
that.

When l was at Tyler, l wanted to be an
illustrator,

and l had a teacher named Stanislaw
Zagorski.

And l never knew what to do with the
typography on my designs.

We would make book covers and record
covers as school projects,

and l'd go to the local art store, l'd go to
Sam Flax, and l'd buy Helvetica as press
type,

and l'd rub it down in the corner of the
album the way l thought it was supposed to
be, kind of flush left.

And of course it would never line up
properly and thing would crackle and break

and it'd be terrible.

And Zagorski told me to let go of the press
type,

and illustrate the type.

And it hadn't dawned on me that
typography could have personality

the way drawing did.

l realized that type had spirit and could
convey mood,

and that it could be your own medium,

that it was its own palate, a broad palate to
express all kinds of things.

So l painted this cover the AlGAAnnual,

and the title of the AlGAAnnual was
Graphic Design U.S.A.

And l decided l would take the title literally

and sort of analyze what Graphic Design
U.S.A. was,

so l decided what l'd do is list every state
in the United States,

and the percentage of people who used
Helvetica.

And l didn't have any scientific evidence of
knowing what percentage of people in
each state used Helvetica,

so l decided to base it on the last Reagan
election.

So that the states that went for Reagan

all had more than 50% of the people who
used Helvetica.

| lf Helvetica was the typeface of the
Vietnam War,

what's the typeface of this war? |

The lraqi War?

Helvetica.

Same time period, l mean it is, it's the
same, it repeated.

That's why we're there. Helvetica caused
it.

And so ln the Postmodern period,
designers were breaking things up.

They wanted to get away from the orderly,
clean, smooth surface of design

the horrible slickness of it all, as they saw it

and produce something that had vitality.

l myself got fairly disappointed

with Modernism in general.

lt simply became boring.

lf l see a brochure now, with lots of white
space

that has like six lines of Helvetica up on the
top

and a little abstract logo on the bottom

and a picture of a businessman walking
somewhere,

the overall communication that says to me
is,

Do Not Read Me, because l will bore the
shit out of you

not just visually, but also in content

because the content will likely say the
same as it says to me visually.

l was in terrible rock bands when l was
fifteen, sixteen, seventeen,

and l think through that experience got
close to the album cover

and essentially l went to art school
because of album covers.

l probably was the last generation who got
taught doing everything by hand,

so you know, we drew 1 0pt. type with a
brush.

ln general, l was always fairly bored, you
know, looking at type books

and deciding over and over again which
type to pick for a certain project.

lt just didn't seem a very interesting task to
do.

So here and there l think with the records,
with the CD covers,

we started to do our own type

and l think there was one instance, it was
for a Lou Reed cover,

where this hand drawn typography
resonated,

and numerous projects came out in that
vein, in all sorts of directions.

You know, in a more funny direction and in
a more serious direction,

where one time an intern carved a hand
type into my skin for a lecture poster.

The type in an instant, in a single image,

tells the story of its making, tells you about
its process,

in a very elegant way, in a very fast way.

That typography strangely became so well
known, just within the design community

of course, that some people thought that's
all we do,

which thankfully is not the case.

Well, l always thought that approach of
people using only three or four typefaces
very suspect.

l think this could be interesting to do for a
single project

as an exercise to put up additional
limitations in order to focus yourself.

But as a strategy over a lifetime

l think it's akin to a writer saying,

l'm only going to write in three or four
words.

Yes, you could probably do it, but for one
why would you,

and for the second would it really yield an
interesting body of work over a lifetime?

Designers wanted to express their
subjectivity,

their own feelings about the world,

their sense that they had something to say
through design,

through the design choices they made.

And of course this caused controversy.

lf you take a figure like Massimo Vignelli,
who'd been one of the Sixties' high priests,

with his company Unimark,

it's right there in the name, Unimark, the
idea of a uniform kind of expression.

When he looked at this new work,

this expressive, subjective, wayward,

to his way of thinking irrational new way of
designing,

lt seemed like the barbarians were not only
at the gate,

but they'd stormed through and they'd
taken over.

ln the '70s, the young generation was after
psychedelic type,

and all the junk that you could find.

And also in the '80s, with their minds
completely confused

by that. . . disease that was called
Postmodernism,

people were just going around like
chickens without their heads,

by using all kinds of typefaces that came
around that could say ''not modern''.

They didn't know what they were caring for,

they only knew about what they were
against.

And what they were against was Helvetica.

l had no formal training in the field,

ln my case l never learned all the things l
wasn't supposed to do.

l just did what made sense to me.

l was just experimenting really.

So when people started getting really
upset, l didn't really understand why.

l'd say, ''What's the big deal? What are you
talking about?''

And it was many years later that
somebody explained to me,

probably better than l can explain it now,

is that basically there was this group that
spent a lot of time trying to organize things,

and get some kind of system going,

and they saw me as coming in and
throwing that out the window.

Which l might have done, but it wasn't the
starting point

and it wasn't the plan.

Only much later did l learn the terms
Modernism, and this and that.

Raygun Magazine was very much
experimental,

it was completely experimental. Every
issue we'd try a lot of things

and a lot of them worked,

and a lot of them didn't work.

l never saw proofs so a lot of times there
were just mistakes,

flat-out mistakes, that people would write
long essays on

why l did this black type on a black boot, or
something.

No, l never saw a proof, what are you
talking about?

lt's very hard to do the more subjective,
interpretive stuff well.

You know, l can teach anybody off the
street

how to design a reasonable business card
or newsletter.

But if l bring the same group off the street
and play a CD

and say, ''Okay, now let's interpret that
music for a cover,

well 9 out of 1 0 are going to be lost

and are going to do something corny and
expected,

and one person is going to do something
amazing

because that music spoke to them and it
sent them in some direction

that nobody else could go. And that's the
area to me where it gets more interesting

and exciting, and more emotional.

And that's where the best work comes
from.

This is an article on the singer Bryan Ferry,

and when l read the article it was very
much like so many of these others l had
read,

and l was like, oh man, how disappointing,
how boring.

And l went through all my fonts, which at
the time would've been hundreds and
hundreds,

uhm, well, it still is for that matter, and

didn't find one that seemed to fit my
disgust and boredom with this article.

And l finally came to the bottom and there
was Dingbats,

which of course now it's Zapf Dingbats so
it's literally the last one.

And l was like, well it's boring and not
worth reading,

why not do it in Zapf Dingbats?

lt's a font. So it's all set in Dingbats,

it is the actual font, you could highlight it
and make it Helvetica or something

and you'd be able to read it

but it really wouldn't be worthwhile, it's not
very well-written.

Don't confuse legibility with
communication.

Just because something's legible, doesn't
mean it communicates.

And more importantly doesn't mean it
communicates the right thing.

And vice-versa, something that may be
difficult to initially read

could be sending a completely different
message

that is valid for where it's being used,

and that may require a little more time or
the involvement of the reader.

But it almost seems strongerthe other way,

if something is a very important message
and it's set in a boring, non-descript way,

the message can be lost.

l mean that doesn't say ''caffeinated''!

lt's just like, hello?

|Why Not?|

lt's just sitting there! There's nothing
caffeinated about it!

There's nothing ''extramarital'' about that.

There's no ''sunshine'' here.

That's no fun, that's not a fun sandlot.

Where's the explosion?

This could be the first date.

This might be close, these buses are kind
of boring.

There's a very thin line between simple
and clean and powerful,

and simple and clean and boring.

That was sort of the rise of what's referred
to as grunge typography,

and that became an all-consuming
aesthetic for two, three, four, five years

as that trend worked its way down from the
masters who originated it

to anyone who sort of already had a
tendency to make mistakes

and all of sudden found that they looked
good now instead of incompetent,

which is how they looked the day before.

Typography was so broken by the end of
the grunge period,

just lying there in a twisted heap,

all rules cast aside, no apparent way
forward,

that all those designers could perhaps do
by the late nineties was to go back

to return to an earlier way of designing,

but with a new set of theories to support it.

For us, modernism does have a more
subversive side.

l think that the whole image of modernism

as something that is primarily concerned
with functionalism,

utilitarianism, that is something that
emerged much later,

that is a sort of a late-modernist thing.

l think the early-modernist movements,

like Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism,

all had their more subversive sides

and their more, how do you call it,

dialectical sides, so they went against
something.

lt's not that we are against that
experimentation

that people like David Carson and Emigré
and Fuse, that Neville Brody did.

We think what we do is a sort of an
extension of that.

All that hunting to the next typeface every
time, it took a lot of energy,

and l can still remember as students that
we were really disappointed

because you wanted to use a certain
typeface and then you saw somebody else
had used it,

Dieses Problem gibt es mit der Helvetica
nicht, weil jeder sie verwendet.

and then you couldn't use it because you
wanted to be original.

And with Helvetica this whole problem is
non-existent because everybody's using
Helvetica.

A lot of people see the way a young
generation of designers uses a typeface
such as Helvetica

as a more superficial way, as a sort of
appropriation of a style.

l think we would very much disagree with
that.

l think all three of us grew up in the '70s

in the Netherlands which was dominated
by the last moment of late Modernism.

For example, the city l was born in and
grew up in, Rotterdam,

the logotype was designed by Wim
Crouwel,

the stamps were designed by Crouwel,

the telephone book was designed by
Crouwel,

the atlas that we used in school was
designed by Crouwel.

So for us it is almost like a natural mother
tongue,

that's something really natural.

lt's not that we ... l mean, a lot of people
think you sort of study it

from books and then copy it or something,
but

l would really say that it's almost in our
blood.

lt's also funny because a lot of people
connect Helvetica

sometimes with the dangers of
globalization

and standardization.

l'm not afraid for that quality at all

because l'm just know that everybody can
put a twist on it.

l think you can put as much nationality

in the spacing of a typeface as in the
typeface itself.

And l think the way people like Crouwel
use Helvetica is typically Dutch, l think,

and that's why l'm never really impressed
with the argument

that Helvetica is a sort of global monster.

l'm not one of those people who is a real
typographer,

l don't know all the fancy words for all the
letters,

and the sort of ligatures and ascenders
and descenders and all that kind of thing.

l just more, sort of, react to certain things,

and just do what l feel is right,

so l'm never sort of a classical type guy.

So l get obsessed about things, l collect
things,

you know, l've got so many bits and scraps
of paper, of things that you find on the
street,

or wrappers. lt's just making something
beautiful out of something very ordinary.

That's what l really enjoy, the ordinary
things

that most people would just gloss over, l
find really beautiful.

The biggest thing for me in terms of design

is to get a sort of emotional response from
a piece.

That's some of the best design, l think.

l see stuff and to me, if it makes me go,

l wish l'd done that, that for me is the
biggest thing, you know.

Or you just get this real whooo, kind of like,
oooh, that's nice.

lt's all about that emotional response.

One of the things l've always really wanted
to design is airplane signage,

an identity for an airline.

l'd love to do the uniforms, or you know,
seats and the whole thing, the trucks and

that kind of thing. l think it would be
brilliant.

You know, l've done these twelve-inch
sleeves for so long;

l want to go a little bit bigger scale now.

lt's that idea that something's designed to
stand the test of time,

and hopefully some of the things l'm
designing will be still being used in twenty,
thirty years.

l'd love to think that.

l got married about three years ago. l did
the wedding invites,

which believe me, is just the worst job you
can ever do as a graphic designer.

l've done other people's wedding invites,
and l'll never do one again.

lt's the most stressful job l've ever had,

dealing with mother in laws is just horrific.
But l did ours,

and on the order of service

l did a little credit to give thanks to Max
Miedinger for Helvetica.

But my wife vetoed that; l had to take it off
the invite.

But it was funny . . .

l think l fell into the step of Helvetica when
l was at DR.

l always really enjoy using Helvetica

because . . .some people say they use a
different typeface because it gives a
different feeling.

And l really enjoy the challenge of making
Helvetica speak in different ways.

lt's been around for fifty years, coming up,

and it's just as fresh as it was . . . obviously,
it wasn't intended to be this cool thing,

but it's just a beautiful font.

Well, we are less obsessed with Helvetica

than we used to be.

Yes, we were really obsessed with
Helvetica, yet not more so much.

We accepted it somehow ... We came to a
point where we accepted that it's just there.

We like restrictions.

We can't operate, we can do nothing
without restrictions.

The more restrictions we have, the more
happy we are.

When we started school,

the influences in graphic design were like
Brody and Carson.

lt's only after that we really looked at Josef

work, and '60s Swiss Typography.

When we started the office we really said

we wanted to look back,

to find more structured design.

For us it's very important to reduce the
elements we use.

When it comes to type, we will only use, if
possible, one typeface,

or two, and if possible we will use one size.

We don't like humanistic typefaces for
example,

it must be more rational

because otherwise it has too much
expression.

We think that Helvetica contains somehow
a design program.

lt will lead you to a certain language also,
and this is also

one of the secrets of the success of
Helvetica

that in itself it is already

it has a certain style, a certain aesthetic

that you will just use it like that,

because of the typeface, because the
typeface wants it like that.

You will do what the typeface wants you to
do.

lf you are not a good designer, or if you are
not a designer,

just use Helvetica Bold in one size,

like for a flyer. . . it looks good.

So it may very well be that when it comes
to trends,

at least in graphic design, we've reached
sort of the end of history.

The pendulum that swings back and forth
doesn't have any more directions it can
swing in.

The final trend may simply be the
completely democratic distribution of the
means of production

to anyone who wants it or anyone who can
afford it.

You can have a music studio for a couple
thousand bucks,

you can have a film studio for ten grand,

you definitely can be a designer with one
or two thousand dollars,

and have basically

similar tools as the people who do this for a
living.

lf all these people have the tools to make
good design,

they realize that it ain't that easy.

lt's not just opening a template in Corel
Draw or in Powerpoint.

lt's not about having the latest version of
whatever program.

lf you don't have the eye, if you don't a
sense of design,

the program's not going to give it to you.

l remember, years ago, a friend of mine
who produced radio commercials

had five guys go out in the hallway of CBS
Records

and sing the beginning of ''Round Round
Get Around, l Get Around''

by the Beach Boys.

And they really tried, they rehearsed for a
week to get their harmonies right,

and they were the best vocalists who
worked in that department on that floor,

and they loved music.

And they went out and they sang it,

and of course they were totally flat and
sounded horribly. . .

terrible. But they'd rehearsed. And then

the voiceover for the commercial said,
''Now you can appreciate the Beach Boys.''

And it's really sort of the same thing.

The closer you come to it, and the more
you see it,

the more you appreciate it when it's terrific.

There are more good, young type
designers

now, by young l mean probably late
twenties, early thirties , than at any time in
history.

So who knows what typefaces they will
design

in terms of style and so on. But they'll be
good.

And to my way of thinking, that is a huge
gain,

a huge benefit that comes with this more
democratic, more accessible technology.

There's just something about Helvetica.

Something about the fact that people keep
saying l've come up with an improvement
of Helvetica.

And it never is really good.

You know, l wonder whether or not
somehow there's some whole
undiscovered science of typography

that would sort of say it's not just because
we're used to seeing it,

it's not just because it was associated with
all these things

that we consider authoritative,

but it somehow has this kind of inherent
rightness.

You know, the rightness of the way the
lowercase a meets the curve,

the rightness of the way the G has the
thing that comes down,

the rightness of the way the c strokes are
like that instead of that.

l mean, l wouldn't have believed that those
things actually could be right or wrong

as opposed to someone's tastes.

Yet we sort of have nearly fifty years of
history of the thing just sitting there

daring people to fix it. And it seems to be
unfixable.

lt's always changing, time is changing,

the appreciation of typefaces is changing
very much.

Why you grab a certain typeface for a
certain job

has a different meaning than we grabbed a
typeface in the fifties for a certain job.

You are always child of your time, and you
cannot step out of that.

What we have is a climate now in which
the very idea of visual communication

and graphic design, if we still want to call it
that,

is accepted by many more people.

They get it. They understand it. They're
starting to see graphic communication

as an expression of their own identity.

And the classic case of this is the social
networking programs

such as MySpace, where you can
customize your profile.

You can change the background, you can
put pictures in,

you can change the typeface to anything
you want,

and those choices, those decisions you
make,

become expressions of who you are. You
start to care about it, in the way

you care about the clothing you're wearing
as an expression of who you are,

or your haircut or whatever,

or how you decorate your apartment-all of
those things.

You know, we accept the idea of identity
being expressed in that way,

through these consumer choices.

Well, now it's happening in the sphere of
visual communication

and there's no reason as the tools become
ever more sophisticated,

why this just won't go on developing,
devoloping and developing.