Helvetica

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.

It seems like air, it seems like gravity.

It's hard to evaluate it,

it's like being asked what you think about off-white paint,

it's just, there.

It's hard to get your head around something that big.

Most people who use helvetica use it because it's ubiquitous.

It'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 I talk? Should I 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.

It is the space between the blacks that really makes it.

In 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.

It'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.

It's not that we don't believe in type.

We believe there are not that many good typefaces.

If I want to be really generous there's a dozen,

basically I use no more than three.

There are people that think that type should be expressive.

They have a different point of view than mine.

I don't think type should be expressive at all.

I 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.

It is a modern type. It is a very clear type.

It's good for everything, pretty much.

You can say I 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 I hate you.

I can write... I certainly can write a few letters in helvetica saying that...

To Washington D.C. in particular, if I can put it that way.

When helvetica came about, we were all ready for it.

It 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.

In 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 1957,

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 I'm saying

by this great feeling shared by many designers of idealism.

I'm a modernist, you know.

I was trained in that period,

I lived in that period. I love modernism.

I go next week to London to see the exhibition of modernism.

I want it, you know.

And well, that's my life.

I'm surrounded with furniture from that period. I can't change myself any more.

But if I see today designers, they use all typefaces-one day one typeface,

the other day the other typeface, all in favor of a certain atmosphere,

I'm not... I don't like that.

I'm always interested in clarity.

It should be clear,

it should be readable, it should be straightforward.

So I started using, gradually, grids for my design,

for my catalogues for museums.

I invented a grid, and within the grid

I played my game.

But always along the lines of the grid,

so that there is a certain order in it.

That's why I use grids,

that's why they call me "gridnik."

For me, it's a tool of creating order,

and creating order is typography.

I started late with the computer.

I think it was in 1993 that I bought my first computer

and I learned myself and I can handle it now quite well

but not like the young people.

I am slow with it and I can do it.

But I'm very much interested and

I 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 I begin?

I made these post stamps on the stijl movement.

In the beginning, if you see the sketches,

I tried to use typefaces from Van doesburg, one of the artists of the stijl movement.

Then I decided for the final designs

not to use these typefaces because the illustration is already from that period,

and I used the most neutral typeface- helvetica.

Helvetica was a real step from the nineteenth-century typefaces.

It 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.

It should be neutral;

it shouldn't have a meaning in itself. It should...

The meaning is in the content of the text, not in the typeface.

That's why we loved helvetica very much.

I have to say that for a lot of my life

I 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, "I thought they were all deadfl

since I did some work for Microsoft in the mid-nineties on screen fonts,

particularly verdana and Georgia,

I'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 I left school, high school in the UK, I had a year to fill before going to university

and I got sent as a trainee, an unpaid trainee, intern,

to a type foundry in the Netherlands,

where I spent a year learning what turned out to be a completely obsolete trade

of making type by hand.

It was a matter of cutting letters in steel, engraving them at actual size.

You know, I doubt if I ever got up quite to one letter a day at that time.

So, you know, I could say that really I've made type by practically all the means

it's ever been made in the fifty, fifty-one years that I've been working.

It's hard to generalize about the way type designers work.

There isn't a generality of us.

But I think that most type designers if they were sitting in this chair

would essentially start in much the same way.

I'd probably start with a lowercase h.

It tells me, first of all, whether this is a sans serif or a serif typeface.

If 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,

I would then do a round letter like an 0 along side it.

I 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 ietterforms like that.

I'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 I would be interested in establishing.

Then I would then build on that.

If you've got an h you've got an awful lot of information

about m, n, and u in the lower case.