Helvetica Notes (Or notes I had to take in class)

Notes about Helvetica (So, I'll use Helvetica font wow, so creative, wow)


Awww yeah, inking process (printing press)

Type faces expresses mood/atmosphere
(Helvetica) is just there
Designer = huge responsibility
     -puts designs into people's heads
Typography is basically white (space between)
     -like music, it's the space between the notes that make the music
Grow up to believe there aren't many good type faces
Type should be expressive? (type shouldn't be?) debatable
Clear type (good for everything)
1950s - interesting period for graphic design
      -feeling of idealism
             -certainly in Europe
      -reconstruct, make them more open, more democratic, social responsibility b/w designers
1957 - Helvetica is formed
     -express modern world in clear way

Clarity, straight-forward
      -GRID
      -use order
      -that's typography
Computers make things easier >_>
     -can speed up your work, not necessarily make it better
Helvetica = neutral face
      -doing away with manual details?
      -shouldn't have meaning within itself
      -meaning in the text, not the type face

Cutting letters with steel
     -type designer

Serif = feet
h first (straight letter)
o next (roundness)
p (half straight, half round)

h gives n and u
p gives q and b

Helvetica (horizontal tones)
      -difficult to second guess

Figure-ground relationship with font and negative space
FIRM (lives in a powerful matrix of powerful space)

1950s - too many zany type fonts
Helvetica - Neutral, accessible, countable, human

Tax forms are in Helvetica (omg)
ETAs - also uses Helvetica (clean and efficient)

Heavily accessible
      -makes it difficult that it's one of the greatest fonts (hmmm)

Helvetica - good type at the time (when it was new)
      -default font
      -never gonna go away because it's the default
      -used a whole lot

Great Couch.

Helvetica has a perfect balance of push and pull?
       -saying to us "don't worry, any other problems you're having... aren't going to spill over, they're going to be contained. In fact, they probably don't exist" what, really?

Post-modernism wanted to get away from the slickness of it all

Type tells you about it's process in a very elegant and fast way

Designers wanted to express feelings through the world, caused controversy (1970s)
     -uniform expression
     -new work, new way of designing (as if Barbarians rampaged through the gates already)

Group of people that was trying to organize, then just thrown out the window

Raygun (?) Magazine = experimental

whaat, he just changed the font on an article to an incoherent font

Grunge typography (lasted a couple of years)
    -all broken at the end of it
    -no apparent way forward
    -time to return to new set of theories