Dear Mr. Hustwit:
Like ever other nerdy graphic designer, I experienced major tingles in all my special places when I first learned about Helvetica, your film celebrating the 50th anniversary of the most ubiquitous typeface in history. Mrs. Guthrie and I got roped into the hype, which included purchasing a pair of Veer’s Helvetica mugs. In fact, I sport the “I Love Helvetica” and the “I Hate Helvetica” pins on my bag, and my “Helvetica” t-shirt is still one of my favorites.
However, I’m very different than many of my designer colleagues in my reaction to the film. Many designers, including this one, got sucked in by oh-my-God-that’s-Massimo-Vignelli moments, but I had hoped that Helvetica would have been more than typography’s answer to US Weekly.
At it’s core, Helvetica amounts to little more than graphic design porn. Not that there isn’t a market for that; I salivate over design annuals all the time hoping one day my skills are as refined as those award winners. Clearly, I’m the audience for your movie. However, typography has become more pervasive in our culture than ever. Fewer and fewer citizens of a modern community can escape set type. Perhaps I wanted too much from your film, but I had hoped that your 90-minute love-letter to a font would include an exploration about how the invisible art of typography influences society and why it matters.
I asked you a question after the opening night screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center here in Chicago, and I wish I had phrased it differently. I started with:
For every person in this audience, there are 50 administrative assistants out there setting their email in Comic Sans.
Don’t get me wrong, I knew this would be a laugh line for the audience, and I’m sure you had heard statements like this before. You had even said that you would not make a sequel called “Times New Roman,” and you interrupted me here to comment that if you made “Comic Sans,” it would be a horror film, which made me chuckle. I continued:
My question to you is: are those sorts of people seeing this film? How are they reacting to it? And do you see your film as being at all evangelical to those people?
That last part of my question was where I screwed up. Instead of challenging your own description of the movie — “It looks at the proliferation of one typeface… as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives” — I asked you about how we can make the rest of society pay attention to the work we do, a silly and arrogant notion on my part. My mistake left you the opportunity to answer, “That’s not the movie I wanted to make,” and left me without the opportunity to follow up and inquire what you learned about “the way type affects our lives.”
You are now shooting Objectified, a documentary about industrial design. I am sure, judging by your previous work, that it will be an exemplary, well-crafted look at beautiful, functional objects and the talented people who design them. Your website suggests that the film will examine “our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.” You are putting the consumer first in your thesis, and I applaud you for that. The consumer, I believe, was overlooked in Helvetica. I hope that consumers of design will learn from Objectified that design is a problem solving process that combines functionality with beauty and elegance, that the user’s experience has more to do with good design than ambiguous aesthetic whims.
In other words, as you said in your answer to my question on the opening night of Helvetica, I hope viewers of Objectified learn more than “Designers are weird.” Yes, we are, but we’re not without purpose.
Thank you. I look forward to some oh-my-God-that’s-Dieter-Rams moments.
Sincerely,
Arlo
