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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.
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