Helvetica
So I’ve been working my way slowly through Helvetica, the documentary about the font. I love it, it’s both geeky and rewarding in a way that not many things are, but it’s also kinda hard work.
Listening to designers talk about the mundanities of typefaces, and drone on about the philosophical implications of their work is only fun if you’re working on something, otherwise it’s a little like hanging out in a doctor’s waiting room when you don’t have an appointment.
The thing that got me was the level of revulsion professional designers still harbor towards David Carson. Says Michael Bierut just after Carson’s sequence in the film, “That was the rise of what’s referred to as ‘grunge typography’, that became an all-consuming aesthetic for about 2, 3, 4, 5 years as that trend worked its way down from the masters who originated it to anyone who had a tendency to make mistakes and all of a sudden found that they looked good now instead of incompetent, which is the way they looked the day before.”
A lot of Carson’s stuff looks dated now, a lot of it is totally chaotic, and some of it is straight up bad. Carson hasn’t done himself any favors by acting like a jackass in the intervening 15 years since he hit the bigtime, but flipping through my copy of “The End of Print” (as I do more often than is probably healthy), it’s hard not to see a kind of retarded genius there.
At the risk of stating the obvious, I think people like whatshisname’s reaction to Carson and to what they’ve dismissively titled the “grunge movement” can be explained simply by examining how each guy sees his role in the creative process, and by the social context of the time.
Helvetica in particular showcases designers who see their role in society as distillers of information, problem solvers, and (to some extent) turd polishers. Good designers take complex concepts and systems and make them intuitively usable, the New York subway map being a good example (and the supplemental bit in Helvetica with Massimo Vignelli talking about his failed map design and contrasting it with what’s in use today is a great distillation of the thought process) of not only how graphic design choices can have direct, daily impact on people’s lives, but of all the pitfalls that must be navigated in creating the work in the first place.
A lot of designers see it as their role to make the world more usable, simpler, more attractive, more legible, and Carson comes along and basically says, ‘No, my role as a designer is to emotionally interpret the subject and come up with something that speaks to the viewer on a visceral level, even if it means making it less legible.’*
I mean, he’s not designing bus signs or airline routing tables, he’s making magazines, and while he did, for a time, make it okay for every designer with a working copy of illustrator to start randomly dropping letters and fucking up their letterspacing, it’s hard for me not to look at a lot of that work and see something that speaks on a poetic level, rather than a literal one, something that designers specifically avoided, and continue to avoid.
The world in which Helvetica grew up was a crazy world. Nuclear war seemed imminent, Vietnam was raging, everybody was on drugs. Design needed to be calm and legible, because people needed something comforting staring back at them from the newspapers and subway platforms. By the time Carson came along, things were pretty much okay. We had Clinton, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and the scariest thing I remember worrying about was whether or not my friends were going to figure out that I didn’t really like Nirvana all that much. Graphic design got pretty fucked up for a time. Kyle Cooper was making crazy title sequences, Underworld and Tomato were making music videos out of flashing lights and weird scary words, Carson was designing for Levis and Knob Creek and Coke, but it was okay, because people had the presence of mind to look at it and interpret it.
Things are scary again now. Even the screensaver-chic of the early 2000s has been replaced by soothing 3d imagery and deathly literal design. Right now it’s all about context. Attention spans are shorter because people are fighting for every moment they’ve got, and advertisers are looking for every way they can find to purchase those moments and trade them for whatever pennies you have left at the end of the day.
As things improve, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see the pendulum start to swing back towards more impressionistic design. Right now we’re being assaulted by typography. Every commercial has captions and legal type and logo bugs, every tv show has lower 3rds popping in telling you what you need to stick around for. Billboards scroll. Everything’s a fucking jumbotron now. At some point, the overload will start to take its toll on the designers themselves. In some ways its already started with the phenomenon of billboard remixing that you see in the subways around New York, but you’ll start to see it bleed into street advertising first, then magazine editorial, then print ads, then TV. Will we ever return to the place where we’re comfortable paying eight dollars for a magazine that prints its articles in the symbols font? Doubtful, but as the cycle continues, pretty soon someone will make a title sequence with a bunch of four frame edits and we’ll at least be back in Dr. Moreau land.
I’m looking forward to it.
Even a documentary about fonts needs a villan, and I can’t think of someone more antithetical to the Swiss school of design than David Carson, I’m just amazed that fifteen years after Raygun hit its stride, people are still describing his work as incompetent.
*obviously not an actual quote.
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