Project Three: Type & Hierarchy
Helvetica
For this project, I created a type specimen poster for the typeface, Helvetica. In my poster, I attempted to emphasize the clean lines and neutral meaning of the typeface while highlighting the distinctive elements of the letters.
Type Research
Typeface Designer: Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas type foundry in Switzerland
Year: 1957 (Named Helvetica in 1960)
Identifiable characters or features: Sans serif font, created to be neutral and convey no inherent meaning, characterized as sleek and modern, nearly ubiquitous today, distinguishable from Arial by vertical or horizontal stroke terminations.
Text: Safe. Neutral. Ubiquitous. Helvetica is everywhere.
Preliminary Sketches
In my preliminary sketches for this project I played with different ways of arranging the elements of text on a page. I decided to limit the amount of information beyond the required typeface name, designer, and date. Helvetica is deliberately a very clean and simple typeface and I wanted to embody that with my poster. I experimented with different content and different orientations but felt that my vertically oriented posters were more successful than the horizontally oriented ones.
Iterations
In my first digital iterations, I played with two different ideas. In the first, I focused on the recognizability of the Helvetica ampersand. I blew up the ampersand so it would read as an image rather than text and arranged it to bleed off the page. In some iterations, I kept most of the ampersand on the page while in others, I blew up the ampersand so much that it became unrecognizable as a specific form. I had hoped to find a part of the ampersand that was recognizable enough to be read as part of an ampersand so blown up but was unsuccessful. The second idea I played with centered around the intended meaninglessness of the typeface. In this version, I added the words, safe, neutral, and ubiquitous to describe the typeface. Because Helvetica was developed to be a utilitarian typeface which would add no meaning to things written in it, I wanted the description of the typeface to be more important on the page than the name of the typeface itself.
Mid Project Critique
By the mid-project critique, I had decided to focus on the posters with the words safe, neutral, and ubiquitous. I tried blowing the words up beyond the edges of the poster so the entire words could not be read and was interested by how that created small spaces for the other information to nestle into. At the mid-project critique I was curious to receive feedback as to whether this concept worked for people who had not been focusing on Helvetica for the past week. I showed the class a version of the poster with the blown up letters and a version with the words as large as was possible without them bleeding off the page. Overall, while some people were confused by the unreadability of the words, the blown up letterforms seemed to be effective.
Based on feedback from the critique, I experimented with turning my poster horizontal to get my blown up letterforms while being able to show more of the words. Though I tried several versions of this poster I did not like them as much as the vertical orientation.
Final Iterations
Moving in to the final phase of the project, I worked on refining my vertically oriented poster with safe, neutral, and ubiquitous blown up and bleeding off the page. I relocated the typeface name, designer, and date based on feedback from the critique and was able to line them up more effectively with vertical and horizontal lines from the words Neutral and Ubiquitous. After cleaning up the alignment and kerning to get the verticals in the letters aligned, I added a spot color to the a in safe. The spot color balanced the typeface name, creator, and date nestled in between the words neutral and ubiquitous. I chose a lighter color that would stand out from the black background and the white text yet still read as part of the white text. I chose to highlight the lowercase a because that is one of the letters which distinguishes Helvetica from Arial.
Final Design
In the end, I felt that my typeface poster did a good job of riding the line between pulling out important elements of the typeface and respecting the modest intentions of the typefaces. The blown up letters allowed me to display the letterforms but recessing the name of the typeface kept it from feeling too self-important. If I were to iterate more on this project I might try nestling the name of the typeface in with N of neutral or using the spot color on a different letter.
