Knowledge in the Arts: Helvetica

Today I watched the documentary Helvetica. The first half was very interesting: it examined the history of the font, including the events and general environment of type design before Helvetica came into being. But most interesting was seeing the wide divide among professional industrial designers about the layers of meaning that the Helvetica font carries. What do letters in that form say? What messages does the font carry?

The one idea that everyone seemed to agree with was that Helvetica is the touchstone of modern typeface. As such, the symbolic layers that the font evoked with each individual designer reflected plainly each designer's overall reaction to clean, minimalist, Ikea-style modernism.

(Ikea never used Helvetica as its font. It used to use a variant of Futura, and the company caused a bit of an uproar a year ago when the switched to Verdana. I wonder what Verdana said that Futura didn't. Is Ikea getting more fru fru?)

Anyway. The search for meaning in fonts shouldn't be surprising. Look at the extent to which stylized, formalized, or just plain artistic writing is the canonical art form in the Muslim world, especially as evidenced in the Arabic of the original Qua'ran. (I wonder if there is a Helvetica in the Arabic typeface world?) Thinking about holy writing, I am pretty sure my copy of the Bible is not printed in Helvetica, nor is the English translation in my copy of the Qua'ran. Apparently the one thing Helvetica does not convey is a strong sense of established tradition.