I just watched the Helvetica documentary (I know, I'm a little behind the curve; it was released in 2007 to coincide with Helvetica's 50th birthday). Fascinating! It interviews a variety of designers over that span of time, from Massimo Vignelli (who came away sounding like a nice man, but a man with one tool in his toolbox) to David Carson (whose talk reminded me of the scolding I got in grade five for experimenting with distorted type in art class). I greatly enjoyed the history lesson as well as the spirited opinions some of the interviewees held about the typeface, and design in general.
I definitely ended the film with more respect for Helvetica as a typeface instead of just the vanilla default setting. The film follows the large swings in popularity, from widespread acceptance and pervasive presence to a backlash against it, to designers who are beginning to return to it. Particularly interesting to me was the story of its creation, as Rick Poyner explains, coming out of the desire of the Swiss designers to "make things more open, make them run more smoothly, be more democratic. There was this real sense of social responsibility." Or as Massimo Vignelli puts it: "The life of the designer is a life of fight...fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us visual disease is what we have around and what we try to do is to cure somehow it with design." (This makes me wonder if Vignelli's Canon was put out by Massimo in the hope that he could cure the "ugliness" of current design by teaching people Swiss Modernism from 50 years ago).
