Helvetica, a documentary | Hacker News Reader

Helvetica, a documentary

hustwit.com

179 pointsarpitbatra12354 comments

I enjoyed learning the cultural context from which Helvetica emerged. In particular, I remember one man talking about how in the early 1900s, a company’s letterhead might have a floral font proclaiming The Inimitable Widgets, Gadgets, and Sprongdonacle Corporation of the Empire State. Then Helvetica comes along, and the company’s letterhead becomes Widgets Co. The same clean look mirrored in Mid-Century Modern and the Space Age.

I do wish the film had more details about the form of the font itself. E.g. explain the anatomy of a font, the choices made about the various parts, why subtle differences between Helvetica and Arial have significant impacts, etc. If anyone knows a good source of that kind of information, I would love to hear of it.

That's the optimistic angle; the pessimistic is that Helvetica grew in popularity due to its being nearly the polar opposite of a just-prior-to-mid-century use of Fraktur by a certain european political party.

(Helvetia itself gained a fourth national language in 1938, due to comments made by someone who made his trains run on time; the dutch reformed their spelling in 1947 to distance their language from a neighbouring country in the same language family who they had had the involuntary pleasure of hosting, etc. etc.)

Maria Ivanova tells her class at the end of the day that they should find out what their ancestors did during the Great Patriotic War. The next morning, she calls on little Johnny. He says "My great-great-grandfather was electrician: his helmet had two lightning bolts..."

Edit: added involuntary, for clarity. Neemt u me niet kwalijk.

> the dutch reformed their spelling in 1947 to distance their language from a neighbouring country in the same language family who they had had the pleasure of hosting

Sorry, what are you trying to say here? The Dutch had the pleasure of hosting what exactly?

> Sorry, what are you trying to say here? The Dutch had the pleasure of hosting what exactly?

Hosted a party! In seriousness though, s/he refers to the German occupation of the Netherlands in WW2.

Luckily that was a long time ago, and those sorts of politics have been discredited for a good portion of a century.

These days we are all excellent to each other and party on.

(if you're ready to party, here's some dutch cultural appropriation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVz_IJoyO6Y )

That is a common misconception. The Nazis initially did not particularly emphasize the use of Fraktur (it was a mixed message), and in 1941 Hitler decided to standardize on Antiqua fonts for all printing. (And modern Grotesks such as Helvetica are based on Antiqua)

> Helvetica grew in popularity due to its being nearly the polar opposite of a just-prior-to-mid-century use of Fraktur by a certain european political party.

Helvetica was developed in 1957 in Switzerland. This was a time when pretty much the only text still printed in blackletter typefaces (like Fraktur) were newspaper mastheads. Outside of Germany blackletter was dead long before that time, and even in Germany it died much earlier. The so called "gothic" typefaces (to which Fraktur belongs) were ultimately banned in early 1941 there.

So the success of Helvetica has nothing to do with Fraktur. If you ask me its success is based on its on own inherent qualities, combined with a portion of luck.

> use of Fraktur by a certain european political party

You mean how Nazi abolished Fraktur along with Kurrentschrift?

> On January 3, 1941, Martin Bormann issued a circular to all public offices which declared Fraktur (and its corollary, the Sütterlin-based handwriting) to be Judenlettern (Jewish letters) and prohibited their further use.

> “In a hundred years, our language will be the European language. The nations of the east, the north and the west will, to communicate with us, learn our language. The prerequisite for this: The script called Gothic is replaced by the script we have called Latin so far.” (Hitler's declaration in the Reichstag, 1934)

To clarify, Nazis did flip their position on Fraktur, and before '41 Antiqua was criticized as ‘Jewish’ just as well. But since the whole country used Fraktur for ages before the ban, associating it with Nazis is ridiculous.

And if I may suggest: Articles of interest – suits[1]. Suits are in a lot of ways the helvetica of garments.

[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/suits-articles-of-int...

Great to see Articles of Interest here! As someone with minimal interest in fashion, I binged the whole thing while slabbing a garden. Fascinating!

Also... Over The Road. Another great podcast.

From the textile viewpoint, suits are the copperplate of garments.

In many cultures, traditional wear can be made out of rectangles of fabric with minimal cutting and sewing. (consider the togas from "Animal House")

A suit used to say "I have so many rectangles of fabric, I can afford to waste most of them by cutting out irregular shapes and then sewing some fraction of the resulting pieces back together". (Now all it says is that I can afford the time to have someone take my measurements)

Considering how much fabric is somewhat redundant in those traditional garments, the measuring, cutting, and sewing are more interesting than the wasted fabric.

I haven't watched Helvetica, but the same director also made Objectified which is fascinating look into the industrial design of everyday products.

https://www.hustwit.com/objectified

seconded. Objectified is a great doc

Definitely. Both are great!

Add Urbanized to that list too, it’s a really great look at how cities and their spaces are designed.

He also recently produced Rams which I’ve not yet had a chance to see but I hope is on par with his previous work.

And if you enjoy these films you’ll also likely appreciate the Abstract series which originally aired on Netflix.

Rams is great. Bought it on Vimeo shortly after it came out. You won’t regret it.

When Rams speaks about design, it always makes me reflect on modern software and how we’ve regressed so much. Though I think’s mostly as a single widget does 20 different things, which isn’t a great idea in the first place.

>Though I think’s mostly as a single widget does 20 different things, which isn’t a great idea in the first place.

You mean like a smartphone? :-)

It's a tradeoff. For example, even a well-equipped kitchen generally doesn't have every sort of one-off small appliance or implement. On the one hand, if you do make a lot of rice, say, a rice cooker makes a lot of sense. If you make rice a few times a year? Probably makes more sense just to make it on the stovetop.

A bunch of Netflix documentaries are available on YouTube. Search for 'netflix feature' , 'netflix episode', or 'netflix full' to find most of them.

Thanks for sharing. Did not know about Urbanized - but looks fantastic!

The director, Gary Hustwit, made his films (Helvetica, Objectified, Urbanized, Workplace, Rams, and others) available for free during the first weeks of the lockdown -- each one for a week. It was nice to see them again.

https://www.ohyouprettythings.com/free

If you haven’t watched this movie yet you really should.

I’d dare say, without it we wouldn’t see half the articles we see on HN about fonts and typography.

I love this movie. Its well done and some of the characters in it are self described nerds. Typefaces are a fascinating subject one you start to get into them.

"Hacker News" typeface in the upper left (which I believe is Verdana) does not have any serifs on it. Serifs are the extra little points and tails on letters. Hacker News body font and logo does not have serifs, therefore it is sans-serif. 'sans' meaning 'without'.

Sans-serifs are also called grotesque (or grotesk) because it appears as though the letters have had limbs amputated. :D Or at least that's how I remember the term. People definitely though they were ugly when they first appeared.

Text written in a serif typeface is considered more distinguished and authoritative . Imagine the bible written in the same font used on HN here, it would look odd.

Isn't HN authoritative and distinguished? I'll let the reader decide. However you should consider that you are reading the word 'fart' right now in it.

Fart.

I can strongly reccommend «Objectified», another one of Gary Hustwits documentaries. It features interviews with the legendary german industrial designer Dieter Ramms, where he praises Apple. It also has an interview with Jony Ive where he talks about the MacBook. «Urbanized» is also a good documentary from Hustwit, about urban design.

In case you also liked the trailer soundtrack, here it is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kn4wUd3UDY

See also: "Behind the Typeface: Cooper Black"

https://vimeo.com/31237546

I liked the information, but I didn't enjoy the "Behind the Music" parody format.

Aside: I noticed that Google has some great fonts as part of Google Slides and other products while helping my daughter with her distance learning homework during the recent COVID 19 scare. In particular, I liked Comfortaa [1], Pacifico [2] (as a Comic Sans alternative), and Merriweather [3] (as a formal alternative for Times New Roman). You can download them here: https://fonts.google.com/?sort=popularity

[1] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Comfortaa [2] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Pacifico [3] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Merriweather

Indeed - Google Fonts lists some good typefaces! I've listed my favourites at https://fonts.tasuki.org/

ROboto ftw

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto

Though maybe people are going to say it's overdone.

From the about page [1]:

Gary Hustwit is an independent filmmaker and photographer based in New York....

In 2007 he made his directorial debut with Helvetica, the world’s first feature-length documentary about graphic design and typography. The film marked the beginning of a design film trilogy, with Objectified, about industrial design and product design following in 2009, and Urbanized, about the design of cities, in 2011. The films have been broadcast on PBS, BBC, HBO and television outlets in 20 countries, and have been screened in over 300 cities worldwide. Workplace, a documentary project about the future of the office, was commissioned for the 2016 Venice Biennale of Architecture. His most recent feature film, Rams, about German design legend Dieter Rams with original music by Brian Eno, was released in Fall 2018.

[1] https://www.hustwit.com/about

Very nice movie, recommend the full set, helvetica, objectified, urbanized, by the same director

I really enjoyed this film, but in telling the story of the cultural power and ubiquity of Helvetica, I think it dramatically underplays the fact that variations on Helvetica have been pre-installed on most modern personal computers by default.

> variations on Helvetica have been pre-installed on most modern personal computers by default

Windows doesn't have one.

Arial

Arial is essentially a Helvetica variation. At it's most charitable, Arial is to Helvetica as RC Cola is to Coke, with Monotype owning Arial and Linotype owning Helvetica.

You're not wrong, but there are vocal designers that wouldn't be happy with that comparison.

I am a bit of a typesetting geek, but the lady who says Helvetica caused the Vietnam War really opened my eyes to damage caused by such a ubiquitous font. /s

This is a great documentary. I watched it a long time ago, and it felt pretty timeless, just like Helvética itself.

Timeless is just another word for "endlessly boring" which the movie isn't, but Helvetica is by now ;)

These guys. Not only they make money from their fonts, but they make money from marketing it, too.

Helvetica shows up in this famous BBC documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBaVwwuErmU

Great film. Wish there was something similar about other typefaces that had significance, e.g. Bauhaus/Universa, Futura, Times, or Comic Sans ;)

Totally worth watch.

I'm hoping the sequel will be about 'Why everyone should love MS Comic Sans'.

The Guardian: Interview: "How we made the typeface Comic Sans"

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/mar/28/how-we-...

I'm probably a cretin, but I just don't understand all the fuss about a font.

Actually a font is a file on a computer, Helvetica is a typeface. Does that help? :D Probably not.

> The distinction between font and typeface is that a font designates a specific member of a type family such as roman, boldface, or italic type, while typeface designates a consistent visual appearance or style which can be a "family" or related set of fonts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typeface

> Probably

Definitely :-)

There's a game called typerider for people interested in typography.

Also, although somewhat tedious, there is a "what font is this?" game called Typewar.

http://typewar.com/

Needs a (2007) in the title. Great film.

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