DESIGN TRILOGY (2007) ✕ Gary Hustwit
[PART #1] HELVETICA
Gary Hustwit is an independent filmmaker based in New York who produced and directed a number of documentaries including the 2007 film Helvetica. Helvetica premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in March 2007, 50 years after the creation of the worldwide famous typeface in 1957.
Helvetica is a film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type.
Gay Hustwist considered typefaces as human beings with huge political, social and economical stories behind them.
Helvetica illuminates the personality behind the typeface we use in our daily lives, without taking care of our visual environment. Typefaces are at the interface between brands and people and they participate to our visual “pollution” i.e the saturation of signs in our life.
Everyday we all receive so many assumptions, so many instructions, we all have to read so much text and take care of so much information. A huge part of this amount of daily information goes through writting expression. Here is the role of typography : you won’t use the same typeface to express two different things. In the french philosophical tradition of semiotics, we speak about “signifiant” (the word you use i.e its formal aspect — langage, number of letters, etc.) and “signifié” (the real meaning of the word or expression, that can differ from the way you express it). Thus, typeface is the formal aspect of what you have to say but it has an impact on what you are actually saying.
Typography gives mood, atmosphere, and colors to a text. Consequently, graphic design that produces typefaces is the communication framework through which messages reach us.
The work of graphic designers is to cure visual disease and contribute to the clarity of messages in our urban and over-saturated visual lives.
Helvetica was created in 1957 and is nowadays the most used typeface in the world : Helvetica is modern, ubiquitous and legitimate. Its success is due to 1970's rational needs in a contemporary informational context where media and brands exponentially increased.
One of its advantages is to be readable and straight forward. There is efficiency and smoothlessness of Helvetica and that s the reason why it the best known typeface in the world.
