Helvetica

Before watching “Helvetica,” I never gave a second glance to the types of fonts that adorned the signs, ads and products that I see and use every day, but after seeing this whole culture of font and the impact it has on onlookers, this past week I began to take a little more notice of the fonts that were, quite literally, all around me. All the George Mason University signs I see every day, telling me the names of buildings, the numbers of the rooms, the instructions beside the phones and equipment telling professors to call tech support if anything goes wrong were all presented in a very clean font, official and easily readable.

Also before watching Helvetica and doing the class reading I usually never noticed the formation of the words either. I tend to think, as I think more people commonly do, that spacing and sentence formation and alignment are not the things to use when trying to be expressive, automatically I would think to change the font to some goofy bold, loud font to show meaning. Therefore, I found it interesting to listen to the side of the veteran typographers who were all about Helvetica. As they said, Helvetica says everything; by messing with the spacing between letters and words and changing the font ever so slightly it is possible to convey a whole new message. Helvetica, according to them, makes other fonts completely superfluous. Just hearing this, I wouldn’t believe it, but to actually see the examples was weird to me, the signature signs of companies like American Apparel that they showed and the subway signs in New York City truly did convey different messages, and I found it odd that I had never even considered the messages signs were screaming out at me.

Although I saw their point — that Helvetica truly can in a sense convey a wide range of emotions — I preferred the designs made by some of the newer typographers who were experimenting with font and spacing in new ways.