My Dog Tulip is based on the book by J.R. Ackerley and is an animated film based on hand-drawn and painted images (shocking I know! ). Christoper Plummer, the late Lynne Redgrave and Isabella Rossellini provide the voices. The drawings are all very loose and sketchy and really catch dog behavior, at least from what I saw in the trailer. It arrives in US theaters in September. Definitely has that poignant yet heartwarming vibe.

While about a third of the film tells the history of Helvetica and its development, most of the documentary is about contemporary type and graphic designers’ opinion of, and relationship with, the font Helvetica. It was a very entertaining introduction for a general audience to the way designers think and feel about the items in their professional toolbox, items which the public never notices, or rather, only notices when they are badly used.

The historical arc of Helvetica’s position has gone from being the new post-war exemplar of clean design to being the “establishment” that newly adult Baby Boomers rebelled against, to being a very useful, neutral wall that contemporary designers can bounce more active fonts and page elements against. This trajectory follows closely the technological revolution from the days of laboriously speccing type and cutting friskets, to the punch-drunk infatuation with the new personal computer, to today’s nonchalant acceptance of digital type and layout flexibility.

Some of the interesting commentary came from the attitudes of the post-modern/deconstructionist generation of graphic designers. It was quite odd to see people well into mid-life slagging off an inanimate object with such adolescently snarky vigor.

Paula Scher associates Helvetica with war and warmongers–and adolescent memories of her mother’s insistence on Paula cleaning her messy room. Really, Paula? Wow, you sure let several sessions at the analyst fly free with that one, didn’t you? How do these memories affect your relationships with clients who use Helvetica as their corporate standard font?

Erik Spiekerman, when asked why Helvetica has become so common, replies, “Why is bad taste ubiquitous?” He then laughs, his ears blushing red. Given the notion that to rely on the cultural default sans serif font rather than deliberating every single time, every single project to find the perfect exact font match is “bad taste,” what happens when your conclusion is that Helvetica is, in fact, the appropriate choice. Is it still bad taste if you’ve fretted about it?

Leslie Savan postulates that Helvetica is used by unfriendly corporations and government agencies to appear warm, friendly and human. I would suggest that government agencies choose Helvetica for reasons of reader usability and increasing compliance, rather than as some kind of subliminal way to affect people’s emotional responses to the state. My own experience at an HMO/insurance provider that had a large department devoted to Medicaid/Medicare HMOs was that while font choice was not dictated, the federal government required that all communications materials aimed at a Medicaid clientele be written at a fourth-grade level or below, due to the large numbers of people on public assistance who have very low education/literacy levels. Likewise, many agencies must deal with EFL/ESL audiences who may be well-educated in their own language, but whose English skills are very basic. They also must have material that can be read by the vision-impaired. Helvetica reads easily in a wide variety of point sizes and also when printed on a wide variety of substrates, including newsprint. The letter forms are simple, which makes it easier for people whose literacy or vision levels are low enough to have difficulty discerning different letters, or who are literate in non-Roman languages and must switch mental gears when reading Latin alphabets.

David Carson opines that the word “caffeinated” ought to look “caffeinated.” He pointed out with pride a magazine profile of Bryan Ferry that he had been asked to design. Reading the interview, he decided that it was a bog-standard rock-star interview not worth the time of reading, so he typeset the article in Zapf Dingbats to show his disgust and create a purely visual page design that, to him, was much more interesting than the words themselves. Since it was his own design magazine, this was entirely appropriate, but OUIGHT the magazine designer’s opinion and visual commentary on the feature content to affect the legibility of said feature–as a general rule? Should anyone care what the designer’s opinions are? If every word reflects its associations, doesn’t that get physically tiring to read? Doesn’t this turn the designer into a gatekeeper between the reader and the content, only allowing the reader to engage with the material through the filter of the designer’s own admitted or unacknowledged biases and opinions?

The film invites designers to consider their own relationship with Helvetica and with fonts in general. Is it possible to create a purely transparent typographic container for verbal content, the so-called “crystal goblet” that Beatrice Ward spoke of? Is it desirable?

What about you? How do you use Helvetica?