Willem Van Lancker - Thematic Essay

Massimo Vignelli called graphic design, and more specifically what graphic designers do, “a fight against ugliness.” He likened it to a doctor battling disease; designers are working to cure the visual disease that infests our surroundings and environment (Helvetica Hustwit). It is true that typography, and on a broader scale, graphic design, affect our response and communication to and with our world subconsciously every day. “Design is solving problems. Graphic design is solving problems by making marks. Type is a uniquely rich set of marks because it makes language visible” (A Type Primer, Kane viii).

So, since typography and graphic design make language visible what dictates how we respond to it? In other words, do we choose fonts, or do fonts choose us? Just as Gary Hustwit provided us with the anecdote of seeing the word “welfare” set in his grungy “punk-rock” font on CNN; seeing words depicted in some qualitative visual manner very often influences and even changes their meaning. The viewer instantly associates the word welfare with something dirty, wretched and negative. However, if the same text were set in a clean, modern font, the viewer’s reaction to the topic could easily be completely the opposite. This phenomenon is very apparent and obvious for some fonts and design elements. For example, if I were to use a rounded, bubbly font such as Comic Sans, the viewer would likely associate the text with fun, children, and light-hearted content. Furthermore, many fonts, though they do not fundamentally imply a certain quality or aesthetic, have become such a part of our mass-culture that they are instantly recognizable or identifiable with a particular message or an unmistakable image. Think of the Coca-Cola script; if you were to see that font forming any other word it is likely you would still think of Coke. At the same time, there are fonts like Helvetica that mean absolutely nothing at all when viewed singularly and objectively, but which can take on such a different character depending upon how they are juxtaposed, that they become the most important font families of all. It is this insidious, subconscious power that typography wields over the population that makes it so interesting. Graphic design allows us to communicate with each other but it also has the power to subliminally dictate our actions every day.

This is definitely not a modern phenomenon, as many would assume. Long before the proliferation of movable type with the invention of Gutenburg’s printing press (circa 1493), fonts have existed and been identified as products and representations of certain cultures, religions, languages and regions. These hand-carved and hand-written fonts have withstood the centuries and are now found on nearly everyone’s personal computer. Fonts like Times, Trajan, and many of the transitional serif fonts, all are rooted in ancient Rome and more specifically, transcribed from the Trajan Column (circa 114 A.D.), believed to be one of the finest examples of truly “Roman type.” The writing styles of the characters in the illuminated manuscripts can be seen on nearly every Irish pub in America, (A Short History of the Printed Word Chappell, Bringhurst). Even then, there was a sort of association by font that people adhered to, each locale having its own way of carving and designing letters.

When the printing press arrived on the typographic scene at the end of the 15th century, fonts and typography in Europe were primarily controlled by the Catholic Church. To differentiate their type style from the Catholic printings, Protestant Dutch monks designed their own letterforms that they carried on their backs to avoid persecution from the Diocese while still spreading their message, (Graphic Design: A Concise History, Hollis 68). So here we have the Protestant people or the clergy at least, attempting to identify and separate themselves as a group in part by using type. The fonts they created eventually led to the common fonts, Caslon, Baskerville, and other modern English fonts. This is where most people get lost in the slight differences between fonts, things like the subtle nuances between Adobe Garamond and Garamond Premier Pro or even greater differences like those between Verdana and Univers. The layperson sees the Target logo and the logo for American Airlines as two entirely different fonts and designs. All the while, it is in fact a careful ruse, a manipulation of the tools and devices that are at a graphic designer’s disposal (and I do not mean the computer). Devices such as leading - the amount of vertical spacing between lines of type, kerning - the adjustment of letter spacing in a proportional sense, and tracking - the amount of space between a group of letters to affect density in text, color, and weight, are just a few that have allowed fonts like Helvetica to take on so many disparate forms and connotations.

Helvetica, with its rigid conformity was born out of the modernist world. The Twentieth century led to the rise of modernism in graphic design as well. The Modernist school of thought was born out of the Bauhaus in Germany as well as the Swiss style of typography. It relied on the simple tenet that less is more. Modernist designers worked out of grids, using strong contrast, and only a few fonts. Years later, during the cultural revolution of the sixties and seventies, design entered the post-modern stage in its development. All of the rules that designers had previously adhered to were often discarded in favor of “humanistic fonts” and hand-drawn designs that often were born out of mistakes in an artist’s work. This period stood in strong defiance to the order and structure of the modernist discipline. Helvetica survived this era as well.

I do not want this to become an essay on the development of typography, so here I will break from my historical and technical recap. Today, in the digital era of typography where virtually no one in the trade physically creates their designs in metal type any longer, the ease of creating type and being a “graphic designer” has become as simple as buying a mac with the latest version of the Adobe Creative Suite. In reality, being an effective graphic designer, the doctor of visual maladies and communication, takes so much more. It does not necessarily only take a degree in the discipline to make a good graphic designer. Instead, a good designer must be an artist, as well as a student of human communication and a keen observer of how people interact with each other and react to their environment. As we have entered the D.I.Y. (do it yourself) generation for nearly every aspect of life, this has led to a proliferation of unsuccessful fonts (just go to 1001fonts.com, fontfreak.com, etc to see for yourself) and uninspiring amateur graphic design.

Though we are living in a state of nearly total media saturation, graphic design still retains its fundamental influence over us, contrary to the idea that if something is such a part of our culture it becomes ubiquitous and invisible. It is entirely duplicitous and insidious in our world - on the Internet, television, the printed word and in our surroundings. However, even though we are bombarded by advertisements every second of every day, we are not immune to their power. We still recognize the giant, iconic Texaco sign as a place to stop for gas and not just a word set in Helvetica Bold.

This argument takes me back to the question that prompted this essay to begin with; do we choose the fonts or do the fonts choose us? I think that it is a combination of both. When someone sets out to find a font that expresses exactly what he or she is looking for, they fall back on the conventions that have been set by our society (i.e. trying to find the perfect font for a new sushi restaurant, nine times out of ten he or she will select the typical “ninja/Asian” style font that everyone is familiar and identifies with). So in this sense, the fonts are choosing us but at the same time this is merely a reflection of the stereotypes and norms that the globally mediated society has created. It is the groundbreaking designs in figure-ground relationships and the balance of form and counter-form that shake the foundations of these trite stereotypical communicators. This is why Helvetica has become the ubiquitous behemoth in the world of typography for the past fifty years. Paula Scher gave Helvetica the tag as the “font of the Vietnam War,” (Helvetica Hustwit) because of its representation of nearly every corporation and government that supported the war; I could not disagree with this more. Helvetica is a font that has redefined how people react to typography because it transcends any one specific tag. If sixty years ago I had told a graphic designer that in 2008 there would be one single font used by mega-corporations including the likes of BMW, Target, Staples, Verizon, USPS, American Apparel, American Airlines, the IRS, Crate & Barrel and Texaco, (just to name a few) I would have been laughed out of the building. All of these companies indeed use Helvetica as their logo typeface. Yet their individual logos each express a visual icon that communicates a powerful message to the viewer. The viewer would never think twice that they were looking at the same font family. Helvetica, has become, not the voice of the totalitarian, but the most essentially human font. So today, in a world where we are beyond modernism, beyond post-modernism, a place where everyone with a computer and an internet connection can communicate their views to millions of people, what will become of typography and graphic design?