The Typeface To End All Typefaces
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

After watching “Helvetica,” you’ll never look at the world in the same way again. That’s because you’ll suddenly start noticing what this smart, breezy documentary about the font abundantly illustrates: Helvetica is everywhere.
Again and again, commentators — pro and con — identify the typeface, invented by the Swiss designers Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann in 1957, as akin to the air we breathe. It’s so common, people don’t even think about it. Yet, that everyday aspect makes this seemingly nerdy topic a clever focal point for a cultural history. First-time director Gary Hustwit, a producer of music-themed docs and the founder of the indie-flick DVD label Plexifilm, has a generous enthusiasm for engaging modern design and its makers, and clearly delights in taking his non-typehead viewers along.
Arriving as it did at the end of the 1950s, Helvetica was primed to explode as the clean, rounded, and rational face of a new visual era. In Europe, its design arose from a kind of utopian ideal, and entered public life as a tool of social harmony. Its name is a variation on Helvetia, the Latin word for Switzerland, and was chosen in 1961 when the font was about to be marketed globally. Its original name, Neue Haas Grotesk, just wouldn’t work. In America, Helvetica was immediately seized by the corporate sector as a brilliant way to jettison the fusty, fussy visual language of 1950s advertising. It also became the language of governmental authority. As such, it’s the font used to represent everything from the Internal Revenue Service and the MTA, to Target and American Apparel. There are hundreds of other examples used in Mr. Hustwit’s film, which gradually begins to make the case that its default usage has diminished what once looked like aesthetic genius. The inclusion of Helvetica in word-processing programs advanced by Apple and Windows succeeded in making the font into McDonald’s hamburgers: billions and billions served.
What keeps this interesting is the eclectic array of designers who show up to argue for and against the font. There is a procession of silver-haired Swiss aesthetes holding forth on behalf of Helvetica’s impeccable negative spaces (the “white space” that occupies the inside of the letter “a” like a hole in a doughnut, for instance), men whose wisdom is challenged by latter-day upstarts and their insouciant “post-modernism.”
The career of Paula Scher, who created album covers for Atlantic Records in the 1970s and became a design force at Pentagram in the 1990s, could be seen as a reaction against Helvetica. Since it is closely associated with the government, in the ’70s she deemed it the typeface of the Vietnam War. And now, she adds only half-jokingly, it’s the font that caused the Iraqi War. Her response was to invent a highly individualistic graphic style based on hand-painted letters that spoke to an organic vision. Likewise, rock ‘n’ roll designer Stefan Sagmeister, another Helvetica-hater, has defined himself by a riotous, punked-out style in which uniformity is the cardinal sin.
These font wars are entertaining, even if you don’t follow design mavens such as Leslie Savan or Rick Poynor, know that the symbols-only font Zapf Dingbats is named after a real Hermann Zapf, or that there was a grunge movement in typography that paralleled the rise and fall of the rock scene. In fact, it’s the slew of odd details and vocal asides that makes “Helvetica” so much more compelling than might be imagined.
Naturally, there has been a backlash to the backlash, and Mr. Hustwit finds a new generation of designers, such as the Amsterdam graphic collective called Experimental Jetset (the name comes from a Sonic Youth album) who eagerly embrace Helvetica with an eye towards reconciling its ordinary contours with punk and dada influences. Perhaps, in returning to its visionary European roots, this promiscuous font can reclaim its soul. Meanwhile, its very existence remains a prod to emerging designers who now face a task not unlike Messrs. Miedinger and Hoffmann, nearly a half-century ago.