Helvetica & liberalism

I just watched an odd documentary called “Helvetica”. Yes, an entire movie about a typeface, now fifty years old. Created to modernize a century-old sans serif font that had become the ubiquitous, and no longer functional, typeface; Helvetica proved to be not merely an exciting new font, it came to represent the movement of history through the end of the last millenium and into this new one. Designed to liberate designers from the tired, obsolete ideas they had dragged through the slog of the world war and its aftermath, within a few decades Helvetica itself was accused of fostering tired, obsolete ideas. As one designer put it, half-jokingly, “Helvetica brought us the Vietnam War”.

And yet today, Helvetica not only remains as popular as ever, designers have discovered ways to make it as alive and fresh as when it was rolled out in the late Fifties. After going through periods of ABH (Anything But Helvetica), the hand-drawn typeface movement and the grunge design movement, designers discovered that Helvetica had the capability to be adapted to almost any purpose. A designer with skill and vision could take the ubiquitous font and make it look like nothing ever had before. Even when the typeface was recognizable as Helvetica, something the pc made almost inevitable (the font was destined to be the original default font for the Macintosh), a creative designer could still breathe new life into the letters and make the piece expressive and exciting.

As I watched this important slice of history being told, largely by those who were central to that history (the talking heads in this documentary were mostly the heads that mattered), my thoughts went to the larger, more important creation of the Twentieth Century, as ubiquitous, desired and then reviled, and now returning to a place of honor: modern liberalism. As the Great Depression threatened to bring the entire planet into the darkness of universal tyranny, those countries with the courage to do so instituted programs based on liberal philosophy. In the United States, FDR’s New Deal made liberalism as ubiquitous as Helvetica became in the Sixties. Government stepped in to rescue the nation from the destructive excesses of the corporations, the self-interested businessmen, stock traders and bankers who demanded the freedom to make as much money as they could under the tired rubrics of capitalism and liberty. The nation embraced liberalism as designers did Helvetica, and for very good reason: They were each innovations that worked wonderfully well in those difficult times.

By the turn of the century, both Helvetica and liberalism had been trashed and were, in the eyes of many, ready for history’s trashheap. Yet a funny thing happened. Young people discovered that both still had much to offer. Designers had more tools than ever to create their own typefaces, and yet nothing emerged to displace Helvetica. What did emerge were new ideas about how to use creativity to make new expressions with what was now an old typeface, older than these designers. And in politics, beginning with the Dean campaign of 2003, the value of liberalism and the great programs brought forward by presidents from Roosevelt through Carter (liberals all) — labor laws, civil rights, environmentalism, justice, education for all, people mattering more than corporations — became clear in light of the neocon retrenchments that had made America less free, less prosperous and less likely to survive the Twenty-first Century.

The movie is available by dvd or Instant Watch on Netflix; it’s brisk, informative and entertaining. Think about the flow of modern history and how we’ve returned to an appreciation of what Roosevelt set in motion in order to save the nation from the Depression. Realize how close we are to the same kinds of destructive forces, the same damage yielded by letting the monied interests have their way at the expense of the rest of the nation, and how what many of us seek today is nothing more than a return to the policies FDR instituted. But there is a difference, and it’s the same difference the young designers bore when they realized the enduring value of Helvetica:

We live in a new time with new ideas, new technologies and lessons about what can go wrong, lessons taught to us by those who carried forward what were then new ideas — liberalism; Helvetica — and allows those ideas to become institutionalized to the point that they no longer had the humane aspect so precious to their creators. We know what can go wrong as well as what we can do right. We must return to an excited appreciation of liberalism; no other political philosophy has done more to make life good and meaningful for more people. We know how it can go wrong, especially as it becomes entrenched in government programs that lose sight of the true purpose: helping people, especially those in most need of help. But knowing this, and with the incredible resources and tools we now have available, we can redesign liberalism to meet the needs of our times. We can look at the huge potential in liberalism and, with a bit of thought and planning, craft the means to rescue our nation from the harm being inflicted by the neocons, the corporatists, and the religionists and the military-industrialists.

Myself, I use Optima whenever possible. And I continue to use it even though I learned, to my disgust, that it was the official font of the McCain campaign in 2008. It’s not the font; it’s how it’s used.