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00:03:48Life of a designer is a life of fight.
00:03:51Fight against the ugliness.
00:03:53against the ugliness just like a doctor fights against disease for us visual
00:04:00disease is what we have around and what we try to do is to cure it somehow you
00:04:05know with design
00:04:11good typographer always had sensitivity about the distance between letters we
00:04:17think that probably is black on white typography is really white you know it's
00:04:22not even black it is the space between the blacks that really makes it in a
00:04:27sense is like a music it's not the notes it's especially between the notes and
00:04:32makes the music for instance we designed the corporate identity for American
00:04:37airline this is done in 1966 and a novelty at the time was the fact of making
00:04:43one word is that two American Airlines by making American Airlines or one word
00:04:48half red and half blue just separated by the color and what could be more
00:04:52American than red and blue you know so it's perfect it's the only airline in the
00:04:57last 40 years that has not changed their identity all the airlines come and go and
00:05:03they change American Airlines still the same and there's no need to change and how
00:05:07they can improve they got the best already you know American Airlines in
00:05:12elevated we always had the tendency to use very few typefaces it's not that we
00:05:21don't believe in that we believe that there are not that many good type faces you
00:05:26know if you want if I want to be really generous is a dozen basically I use no
00:05:32more than three there are people that things that the type should be expressive they
00:05:38have a different point of view or from mine I don't think type should be
00:05:42expressive at all I mean I can write the word dog with any typeface and it
00:05:47doesn't have to look like a dog you know but there are people that when the right
00:05:51dog is should bark here you know what are very things it's a typeface that are
00:05:59generated by a desire or having a better legibility it is a modern time it is
00:06:08a very clear type it's good for everything pretty much you can say I love
00:06:14you in Helvetica and you can say it with a very castra light if you want to be
00:06:20really fancy or you can say with the extra bold if he's really intensive and
00:06:24passionate you know and it might work you can also say I hate you you know I can
00:06:29write you know I certainly can write few letters in Helvetica and then saying
00:06:36that to Washington in particular if I can put it that way when Helvetica came
00:06:46about we were all ready for it it just had all the right connotation that we were
00:06:51looking for for anything that had to spell out nothing clear modern the 1950s
00:07:03is an interesting period in the development of graphic design in that
00:07:07post-war period after the the horror and the cataclysm of the Second World War
00:07:12there's a real feeling of idealism among some designers many perhaps across the
00:07:18world certainly in Europe the design is part of that need to rebuild to
00:07:25reconstruct to make things more open make them run more smoothly be more
00:07:32democratic there there was this real sense of social responsibility among
00:07:37designers and this is the period when the early experiments of the high
00:07:42modernist period start to be broken down rationalized codified you get the
00:07:49emergence of this so-called international typographic style or Swiss style and it's
00:07:56Swiss designers in the 1950s who are really driving that along this is where
00:08:02Helvetica comes in Helvetica emerges in that period in 1957 where there's felt to be a
00:08:09need for rational typefaces which can be applied to all kinds of contemporary
00:08:14information whether it's science systems or corporate identity and present those
00:08:20visual expressions of the modern world to the public in an intelligible legible
00:08:25way so it's underpinned is what I'm saying by this great feeling shared by many
00:08:31designers of idealism
00:09:01I'm a modernist you know I was trained in the period I lived in the period I love modernism I go next week to London to see the exhibition of modernism
00:09:08I want it you know and and well that's my life I'm I'm a modernist I was trained in the period I live in the period I love modernism I go next week to London to see the exhibition of modernist I want it you know and and
00:09:34And well, that's my life.
00:09:37I'm surrounded with furniture from that period
00:09:40and I can't change myself anymore.
00:09:43But if I see today designers,
00:09:45they use all typefaces through each other,
00:09:47one day, one typeface, the other day, the other typeface,
00:09:50all in favor of a certain atmosphere,
00:09:54I'm not, I don't like that.
00:10:00I'm always interested in clarity.
00:10:04It should be clear, it should be readable,
00:10:08it should be straightforward.
00:10:10So I started using gradually grids for my design,
00:10:14for my catalogues, for museums.
00:10:16I invented the grid and within the grid,
00:10:19I played my game, but always along the lines of the grid
00:10:23so that there is a certain order in it.
00:10:26That's why I used grids, that's why I called me Gridneck.
00:10:30For me, it's a tool of creating order.
00:10:33And creating order is typography.
00:10:39I started late with the computer.
00:10:41I think it was 1993 that I bought my first computer
00:10:46and I learned myself and I can handle it now quite well,
00:10:50but not like the young people.
00:10:53I'm slow with it and I can do it,
00:10:56but I'm very much interested.
00:10:58And I would have liked to have in the 60s the computer
00:11:02because we can speed up our work.
00:11:04We can do it so much better.
00:11:06And especially all the layers that you can bring into your work.
00:11:11We had the greatest problem in the 60s to bring two or three layers into work.
00:11:16You need to do it by photograph.
00:11:18You do, you did it all kinds of, of crazy techniques.
00:11:22And working on a poster took us days.
00:11:25And now within half an hour, you have your ideas
00:11:28and you can make variations and make a good choice.
00:11:33You can do better design with a computer,
00:11:36but you can speed up your work enormously.
00:11:39Shall I begin?
00:11:40Sure.
00:11:41I made these post stamps on the style movement.
00:11:45In the beginning, if you see the sketches,
00:11:48I tried to use typefaces from Van Duisburg,
00:11:51one of the artists of the style movement.
00:11:54Then I decided for the final designs not to use this typeface
00:11:59because the illustration is already from the period.
00:12:02And I used the most neutral typeface, Helvetica.
00:12:06The Helvetica was a real step from the 19th century typeface.
00:12:13It was a little more machined.
00:12:16It was doing away with these manual details in it.
00:12:23And we were impressed by that because it was more neutral.
00:12:28More neutral.
00:12:29And neutralism was a word that we loved.
00:12:32You know, it should be neutral.
00:12:34It shouldn't have a meaning in itself.
00:12:36It should, the meaning is in the content of the text
00:12:41and not in the typeface.
00:12:44And that's why we loved Helvetica very much.
00:12:47You know what?
00:13:03I have to say
00:13:33that for a lot of my life
00:13:35I rather dreaded
00:13:37the moment of having to explain to someone
00:13:39you know you find yourself sitting next
00:13:41to some nice person on a plane or
00:13:43a train and they ask you sooner or later what
00:13:45you do and if you say
00:13:47type designer they
00:13:49generally look completely blank
00:13:51occasionally someone
00:13:53will actually know the term
00:13:55but then will say I thought they were all dead
00:13:57since I did some work for Microsoft
00:14:01in the mid 90s on
00:14:03screen fonts particularly Verdana
00:14:05and Georgia I've had quite
00:14:07comical encounters with people who
00:14:09will say oh you work with fonts
00:14:11we just got this memo
00:14:13around the office we've all got to start using
00:14:15something called Verdana have you ever heard of it or something
00:14:17or other you know it's funny conversations
00:14:19that never
00:14:21would have happened to me you know
00:14:2330 40 years ago
00:14:24my dad was
00:14:27a typographer and although he didn't
00:14:29push me to follow in his footsteps
00:14:31when I left school
00:14:33high school in the UK
00:14:34I had a year to
00:14:37fill before going to university
00:14:39and I got sent as a trainee
00:14:41unpaid trainee intern
00:14:42to a type foundry in the Netherlands
00:14:45where I spent a year learning
00:14:47what turned out to be completely obsolete
00:14:49trade of making type by hand
00:14:51it was a matter of cutting letters in steel
00:14:54engraving them at actual size
00:14:57you know I doubt if I ever got up
00:14:59quite to one letter a day
00:15:01at that time
00:15:02so you know I could say that really
00:15:05I've made type by practically all the
00:15:07means it's ever been made in 50
00:15:0951 years that I've been working
00:15:11it's hard to generalize
00:15:13about the way type designers work
00:15:14there really isn't a generality of
00:15:17all of us but I think that most type designers
00:15:20if they were sitting in this chair
00:15:21would essentially start in much the same way
00:15:25I would probably start with a lowercase h
00:15:27it tells me first of all whether this is a sans serif
00:15:30or a serif typeface
00:15:31if it were a serif face
00:15:33it would look like this
00:15:34here are the serifs so called
00:15:36these little feet on the bottom
00:15:38and the top of the principal strokes of the letter
00:15:40are they heavy?
00:15:42are they light?
00:15:43what is the nature of the serif?
00:15:45is there a lot of
00:15:47six in contrast in the letter form?
00:15:50what are the proportions of the overall height
00:15:52the ascender so called of the h
00:15:54and the x height part of it
00:15:56the lower part of it
00:15:57then because an h is a straight-sided letter
00:16:00I would then do a round letter
00:16:02like an o alongside it
00:16:04I can get a sense of
00:16:06how the weight of the curved part of the o
00:16:09relates to the weight of the straight part of the h
00:16:11and already there is a huge amount of DNA
00:16:15in just a couple of letter forms like that
00:16:17I would then probably do something like a lowercase p
00:16:19because it's half straight and half round
00:16:22and also it has a descending stroke
00:16:24which is another vertical dimension
00:16:26that I would be interested in establishing
00:16:28I would then build on that
00:16:30if you've got an h
00:16:30you've got an awful lot of information
00:16:32about mn and u in the lowercase
00:16:33you've got a p you've got q and b and d and so on
00:16:37and then just as soon as possible
00:16:40I would get them into words
00:16:42or something that looked like words
00:16:44because for me the experience of reading something
00:16:46is so critical in judging it as a typeface
00:16:50because I find that that is
00:16:53that's the acid test really of how a typeface performs
00:16:55one of the most characteristic and to my mind beautiful things about Helvetica
00:17:05is these horizontal terminals
00:17:07you see in the lowercase a and c and e and g
00:17:11the whole structure is based on this horizontal slicing off of the terminals
00:17:16it's very hard for a designer to look at these characters and say
00:17:21how would I improve them
00:17:22how would I make them any different they just seem to be exactly right
00:17:26I'm glad no one ever asked me to
00:17:29to second guess Helvetica
00:17:31because I wouldn't know I wouldn't know what to do
00:17:34this is the original type specimen of Helvetica
00:17:38before it was Helvetica it had its original name
00:17:40the Neue Haase grotesque
00:17:43the whole story of how Helvetica came into being
00:17:47is is not entirely clear at least to me
00:17:50it is said and I think it's true
00:17:51that Eduard Hoffman who had been the boss at the Haase type foundry
00:17:56wished to make a modernized version of accidents grotesque
00:18:01which was essentially a traditional 19th century German sans serif
00:18:05and his method of doing that was to sort of clean it up and so on
00:18:10and it was of course Max Miedinger who made the drawings for Helvetica
00:18:13I received the impression from people I knew back in the 60s and 70s
00:18:18that Hoffman's part in this was a very much more significant one
00:18:23than you might just assume by reading in a in a textbook that Max Miedinger was the designer of Helvetica
00:18:30you
00:18:35You can easily say this was a joint product of
00:19:04both Miethinger and my father. Miethinger couldn't produce a typeface alone,
00:19:12neither could my father, but when both were working hard together then something
00:19:19good resulted.
00:19:22Here are the first trials of Naja Haas Cortesk, which was the first name of Helvetica.
00:19:36I knew the way things worked at Haas and I had gradually picked up on the importance
00:19:45of Edward Hoffman and his almost pathological shyness and the way that he would use other
00:19:56people's hands. But boy could you see his mind at work on the faces where he was deeply involved.
00:20:05You have here a note by Edward Hoffman indicating all the desired corrections.
00:20:13The capital Y is too slim. Capital A is also too slim.
00:20:22When you talk about the design of the Haas Neuer Grotesque or Helvetica, what it's all about
00:20:30is the interrelationship of the negative shape, the figure-ground relationship, the shapes between
00:20:39characters and within characters, with the black, if you like, with the inked surface.
00:20:45And the Swiss pay more attention to the background so that the counters and the space between characters
00:20:52just hold the letters. I mean, you can't imagine anything moving. It is so firm. It's not a letter
00:21:01that's bent to shape. It's a letter that lives in a powerful matrix of surrounding space. It's...
00:21:12Oh, it's brilliant when it's done well.
00:21:15My father had clear ideas how the typeface should look like.
00:21:21So, my father and Miedinger sat together and he started drawing. Here you have a proof of an alphabet
00:21:31with observations by Max Miedinger.
00:21:34When Miedinger worked for Haas, he did not work as a designer. He was actually a salesman.
00:21:40His job was to travel around Switzerland taking orders for fonts of type.
00:21:44By profession, he was a graphic artist. But he realized that he could make more money in selling foundry type.
00:21:53But my father said, if ever I have an idea of a new typeface, I'm sure that you could design it.
00:22:01I have here a type specimen book of both type foundries, Stempel and Haas.
00:22:13You have to know that Haas was controlled by the German type foundry Stempel.
00:22:20And in turn, Stempel was also controlled by the Linotype.
00:22:41Now we go down to the cellar and see in our archives where we can find Helvetica.
00:23:02And here we have number 24.
00:23:08And there it is, Wu, the Helvetica, drawings.
00:23:14The marketing director at Stempel had the idea to give it a better name.
00:23:20Because Neue, Haas, Grotesque didn't sound very good for a typeface that was intended to be sold in the United States.
00:23:31Stempel suggested the name of Helvetia.
00:23:38This is very important.
00:23:40Helvetia is the Latin name of Switzerland.
00:23:44My father said, it's impossible.
00:23:47You cannot call a typeface after the name of a country.
00:23:54So he said, why don't we call it Helvetica?
00:24:00So in other words, this would be the Swiss typeface.
00:24:04And they agreed.
00:24:06And I think Helvetica was the perfect name at that time.
00:24:09And the Swiss typography at that time also was well known worldwide.
00:24:16So it was the best solution for Helvetica to get into the market.
00:24:22Once we introduced Helvetica, it really ran away.
00:24:27It was exactly what the designers were looking for.
00:24:32I mean, I don't think there's been such a hot thing since as the figure ground relationship properly executed.
00:24:41And it was, oh, just a landslide waiting to go down the mountain, you know.
00:24:48And away it went.
00:24:50I imagine there was a time when it just felt so good to take something,
00:25:19that was old and dusty and homemade and crappy looking and replace it with Helvetica.
00:25:26It just must have felt like you were scraping the crud off of, like, filthy old things
00:25:32and kind of restoring them to shining beauty.
00:25:35And in fact, you know, corporate identity in the 60s, that's what it sort of consisted of.
00:25:40You know, clients would come in and they'd have, like, you know, piles of goofy old brochures from the 50s,
00:25:48that had, like, shapes on them and, like, goofy bad photographs.
00:25:52They'd have some letterhead that would say amalgamated widget on the top
00:25:56and some goofy, maybe a script typeface above amalgamated widget.
00:25:59It would have, like, an engraving showing their headquarters in, you know, Paducah, Iowa,
00:26:04with smokestacks belching smoke, you know.
00:26:07And then you'd go to a corporate identity consultant circa 1965, 1966,
00:26:12and they would take that and lay it here and say here's your current stationery and all it implies,
00:26:18and this is what we're proposing.
00:26:19And next to that, next to the belching smokestack and the nuptial script and the ivory paper,
00:26:26they'd have a crisp, bright white piece of paper, and instead of amalgamated widget founded in 1857,
00:26:33it just would say Widjko in Helvetica media.
00:26:37Can you imagine how bracing and thrilling that was?
00:26:39That must have seemed like you would crawl through a desert with your mouth just caked with filthy dust,
00:26:45and then someone's offering you a clear, refreshing, distilled, icy glass of water
00:26:50to kind of clear away all this horrible kind of, like, burden of history.
00:26:56It must have just been fantastic.
00:26:58And you know it must have been fantastic because it was done over and over and over again.
00:27:05So this is what I'm talking about. This is Life Magazine, 1953.
00:27:10One ad after another in here just kind of shows every single visual bad habit that was, like, endemic in those days.
00:27:18You've got, you know, zany hand lettering everywhere.
00:27:21Just swash typography to kind of signify elegance.
00:27:25Exclamation points, exclamation points, exclamation points.
00:27:28Cursive wedding invitation typography down here reading almost everyone appreciates the best.
00:27:34This was everywhere in the 50s. This is how everything looked in the 50s.
00:27:37You cut to, um, this is after Helvetica was in full swing, same product.
00:27:42No people, no smiling bakery, just a beautiful big glass of ice cold Coke.
00:27:49The slogan underneath, it's the real thing, period. Coke, period.
00:27:55In Helvetica, period. Any questions? Of course not. Drink Coke, period. Simple.
00:28:04Governments and corporations love Helvetica because, on one hand, it makes them seem neutral and efficient,
00:28:10but also it's the smoothness of the letters makes them seem almost human.
00:28:16That is a quality they all want to convey because, of course, they have the image they're always fighting,
00:28:22that they are authoritarian, they're bureaucratic, you lose yourself in them, they're oppressive.
00:28:27So, instead, by using Helvetica, they can come off seeming more accessible, transparent, and accountable,
00:28:34which are all the buzzwords for what corporations and governments are supposed to be today.
00:28:40Now, they don't have to be accessible or accountable or transparent, but they can look that way.
00:28:46Our tax forms from the IRS are in Helvetica. The EPA uses it.
00:28:59Now, there's someone who wants to look clean and official and efficient.
00:29:03The EPA uses it.
00:29:31Designers, and I think even readers, invest so much of the surroundings in the typeface.
00:29:37American Apparel uses Helvetica, and it looks cheeky.
00:29:41And American Airlines uses it, and it looks sober.
00:29:43And it's not just a matter of the weight they choose and the letter spacing and the colors.
00:29:46There's something about the typeface that I think really invites this sort of open interpretation.
00:29:51You can say that typefaces are either those that are fully open to interpretation or merely have one association attached to them.
00:30:01You know, a typeface made of icicles or candy canes or something just says one thing, and Helvetica maybe says everything.
00:30:06And that's perhaps part of its appeal.
00:30:08I mean, typography has this real poverty of terms to describe things beyond, you know, x-height and cap-height and weight and so on.
00:30:17I find that when Tobias and I are working on projects together, we tend to use a lot of qualitative terms that are entirely subjective.
00:30:23Working on the typeface for Esquire years ago, I remember us saying, I remember my saying, no, this has that like Saturn V rocket early NASA quality.
00:30:32It needs to have that orange plastic Olivetti typewriter Roman holiday espresso feeling.
00:30:37And I know you got exactly what I was saying.
00:30:39I did.
00:30:40But it's that there's really no way to describe the qualitative parts of typeface without resorting to things that are fully outside it.
00:30:46And we're constantly saying, you know, this has that like, it feels kind of Eric Satie.
00:30:50It needs to be Debussy, right?
00:30:52This has a kind of belt and suspenders look.
00:30:54It needs to be, you know, much more elegant, hand-lasted shoe.
00:30:59I've been collecting these signs for a couple of years now.
00:31:04And one of my favorites is these signs.
00:31:11I have a number of these.
00:31:13This is what the street signs in New York City used to look like.
00:31:16This actually functions so much more clearly and so much more effectively than what we see out on the street now.
00:31:23The sort of classical modernist line on, you know, how aware a reader should be of a typeface is that they should be aware of it at all.
00:31:32You know, it should be this crystal goblet, you know, there to just hold and display and organize the information.
00:31:40But I don't think it's really quite as simple as that.
00:31:44I mean, I think even if they're not consciously aware of the typeface they're reading, they'll certainly be affected by it.
00:31:53The same way that an actor that's miscast in a role will affect someone's experience of a movie or play that they're watching.
00:32:01They'll still follow the plot, but, you know, be less convinced or affected.
00:32:07I think the typography is similar to that, you know, where the, you know, a designer choosing typeface is essentially a casting director.
00:32:18There's very little type in my world outside of work.
00:32:22Like everybody else, I'm aware of the fonts being used in my environment and, you know, the standing joke that graphic designers can't see historical movies because the fonts are always wrong is certainly true.
00:32:32It definitely makes the world outside the office, you know, very different.
00:32:36Um, it was, uh, my fiancée and I were, um, trying to remember the location of a restaurant in our neighborhood.
00:32:43And she remembered it as, um, that new place that's just a couple blocks down from the dry cleaner.
00:32:49I remembered it as that new place just a couple blocks down from the place with bad letter spacing out front.
00:32:54Nobody doesn't know what Helvetica is.
00:32:58I mean, at the beginning of our careers, certainly, before everybody had a PC or a Mac, um, knowing what fonts were, I think even then people might have known what Helvetica was.
00:33:07Um, the fact that it's been so heavily, uh, licensed and made available through these very populous technologies, um, has kind of furthered the mythology that it's the ultimate typeface in some way.
00:33:19Um, and even, I think for us professionals, that's hard to escape from.
00:33:22I sort of find myself buying into the idea that, oh, the sans serp evolved for a hundred years and the ultimate expression was Helvetica.
00:33:28And realizing sort of, wait a minute, that's not quite true historically or aesthetically or culturally or politically.
00:33:34But, um, it's, it, it, there's something about it that does have a feeling of finality to it.
00:33:39This is the, um, the conclusion of one line of reasoning was this typeface.
00:33:43And perhaps everything after it is, um, secondary in some way.
00:33:48It's very cool.
00:33:54It's minus three.
00:33:57It's tapered.
00:34:06Alright.
00:34:07Let's try to notice.
00:34:09And importantly, what's on purpose.
00:34:11Now?
00:34:13Uh, wait a minute, wait a minute.
00:35:15I'm obviously a typomaniac, which is an incurable, if not a mortal disease.
00:35:35I can't explain it. I just like looking at type. I just get a total kick out of it.
00:35:39They are my friends. Other people look at bottles of wine or whatever, or girls' bottoms.
00:35:45I get kicks out of looking at type. It's a little worrying, I must admit, but it's a very nerdish thing to do.
00:35:50I'm very much a word person. So that's why typography for me is the obvious extension. It just makes my words visible.
00:35:57A real typeface needs rhythm, needs contrast. It comes from handwriting. That's why I can read your handwriting, you can read mine.
00:36:03And I'm sure our handwriting is miles away from Hervetica or anything that would be considered legible.
00:36:07But we can read it because there's a rhythm to it. There's a contrast to it. Hervetica hasn't got any of that.
00:36:11Why, 50 years later, is it still so popular?
00:36:17I don't know. Why is bad taste ubiquitous?
00:36:21No, it's actually, Hervetica was a good typist at the time. It really answered the demand.
00:36:26But now it's become one of those defaults that, partly because of the proliferation of the computer, which is now 20 years.
00:36:33The PC, I mean, you know, it was the default on the Apple Macintosh, and then it became the default on Windows,
00:36:40which copied everything that Apple did, as you know, the interface and everything else.
00:36:43And then they did the clone version, Arial, which is worse than Hervetica, but feels the same purpose.
00:36:50I think now it's probably never going to go away because it is ubiquitous. It's a default.
00:36:55It's air, you know, it's just air. I mean, there's no choice. You have to breathe, so you have to use Hervetica.
00:37:02It brings a style with it. Every typist does. It has a certain, well, it's like a person, you know.
00:37:08If you're slightly heavy in the middle, you're not going to walk around in tight T-shirts. You look an idiot.
00:37:12And Hervetica is heavy in the middle, so it has a certain, it needs certain space around.
00:37:16It needs a lot of white space. It needs very carefully to be looked at the weight gradations.
00:37:21It has no, it needs a lot of space sideways also.
00:37:24Then it's very legible, but very small and very tightly done and very lightly as modern designers.
00:37:29It's a nightmare. It's a total nightmare.
00:37:30I wouldn't say this if I hadn't tried it, you know, some, but because all the letters,
00:37:35it's the whole Swiss ideology, the guy who designed it, tried to make all the letters look the same.
00:37:40Hello? You know, that's called an army. That's not people.
00:37:43That's people having the same fucking helmet on.
00:37:46Doesn't further individuals, and the aim with type design is always to make it individually enough
00:37:51so that it's interesting, but of course, 95% of any alphabet has to look like the other alphabet,
00:37:56but otherwise, you wouldn't be able to read it.
00:38:03I've never sort of woken up with a typeface coming on.
00:38:05You know, like some people,
00:38:05I've got to do this, and they have to, you know, go to their, whatever, their easel,
00:38:09and, you know, these amazing brushstrokes.
00:38:11I don't have that urge, you know.
00:38:12I wake up, and I usually want to go back to sleep.
00:38:16I mean, everybody puts their history into their work,
00:38:18and I certainly know that when I draw something, it has,
00:38:22I'm sort of, I'm fast, I'm loud, I'm chaotic,
00:38:26I'm not very rule-based, even though I'm German, and I love rules,
00:38:31but I'm way too chaotic.
00:38:33I mean, I'm in Germany.
00:38:33It was my birthday yesterday, so I went over the place, essentially.
00:38:37I'm always on time, but I'm always, but a year late, you know what I mean?
00:38:40So it's, but then I'm on the second, so I have this horrible thing in it,
00:38:44which looks, which comes out of my typefaces.
00:38:46They are never perfect.
00:38:48They always have a little edge in the sense that I leave them alone
00:38:50when I get bored with them.
00:38:52I know there's people who hate me,
00:38:54who would never use one of my typefaces in a million years,
00:38:56and vice versa.
00:38:57People would use any typefaces I design,
00:38:59not because it's good for them or it fits the purpose,
00:39:02simply because I did it.
00:39:04And I think we all do that.
00:39:05I mean, you know, certain bands I buy every CD from,
00:39:07some of them are crap,
00:39:08but I buy them because I've always bought their CDs or their music.
00:39:13Why do people buy certain things?
00:39:15The brand rubs off on them.
00:39:17And typefaces are a brand.
00:39:19You're telling an audience this is for you
00:39:21by using a certain typographic voice.
00:39:25You know, you'd recognize a Marlboro brand two miles away
00:39:28because they use a typeface that they only use.
00:39:30You can buy it.
00:39:31I have it.
00:39:31Anybody can buy it.
00:39:32It's called Neocontact.
00:39:33Anybody can buy it.
00:39:34But Marlboro have made that typeface theirs.
00:39:35You can recognize any Marlboro ad from miles away
00:39:38because of their stupid typeface.
00:39:40If they use Hervetica,
00:39:42no, it wouldn't quite work.
00:40:13The way something is presented will define the way you react to it.
00:40:22So you can take the same message and present it in three different typefaces.
00:40:27The response to that, the immediate emotional response, will be different.
00:40:31And the choice of typeface is the prime weapon, if you want, in that communication.
00:40:41And I say weapon largely because these days with commercial marketing and advertising,
00:40:47the way the message is dressed is going to define our reaction to that message in the advertising.
00:40:53So if it says, buy these jeans, and it's a grunge font, you would expect it to be some kind of ripped jeans
00:41:02or to be sold in some kind of underground clothing store.
00:41:07If you see that same message in Hervetica, you know it's probably on solar gap.
00:41:13It's going to be clean, that you're going to fit in, you're not going to stand out.
00:41:16All of us, I would suggest, are prompted in subliminal ways.
00:41:23Maybe the feeling you have when you see a particular type of graphic choices used on a piece of packaging
00:41:29is just, I like the look of that, that feels good, that's my kind of product.
00:41:33But that's the type casting its secret spell.
00:41:49In a way, the Hervetica is a club.
00:41:53It's a mark of membership.
00:41:55It's a badge that says we're part of modern society, we share the same ideals.
00:42:00It's well-rounded, it's not going to be damaging or dangerous.
00:42:08Hervetica has almost like a perfect balance of push and pull in its letters.
00:42:14And that perfect balance sort of is saying to us, well, not sort of, it is saying to us,
00:42:21don't worry, any of the problems you're having or the problems in the world
00:42:25or problems getting through the subway or finding a bathroom,
00:42:28it's all, all those problems aren't going to spill over.
00:42:31They'll be contained.
00:42:33And in fact, maybe they don't even exist.
00:42:35What I like is if this very serious typeface tells you the do's and don'ts of street life
00:42:55and it must be Hervetica at that moment.
00:43:05The image of Hervetica as the corporate typeface made it so-called the typeface of capitalism,
00:43:13which I would actually reject and say it's the typeface of socialism because it is available all over
00:43:22and it's inviting dilettantes and amateurs and everybody to do typography,
00:43:33to create their own type design.
00:43:35And I think that's, um, it's a good thing.
00:43:39I think I'm right calling Hervetica the perfume of the city.
00:43:56It is just something we don't notice usually, but we would miss very much if it wouldn't be there.
00:44:03I think it's quite amazing that the typeface can advance to such a status in our life.
00:44:10As is always the case with any style, there's a law of diminishing returns.
00:44:23The more you see it, the more the public sees it, the more the designer uses those typographic
00:44:29and graphic solutions, the more familiar, predictable, and ultimately dull they become.
00:44:35By the time I started as a designer, it sort of seemed there was only one trick in town,
00:44:44which is like what could you use instead of Hervetica, you know, AVH, anything but Hervetica.
00:44:49And you do need lots of sans-serif typefaces, but it seemed like Hervetica had just been used so much
00:44:55and overused so much and associated with so many kind of big faceless things
00:44:59that it had lost all its capacity even, to my eyes at least, to look nice.
00:45:03And by the 70s, especially in America, you start to get a reaction against what it seems to those designers
00:45:12is the conformity, the kind of dull blanket of sameness that this way of design is imposing on the world.
00:45:21So something that had come out of idealism has by this time become merely routine,
00:45:27and there's a need for a change.
00:45:33You come into design at the point that you start out in history without knowing you're starting out in history,
00:45:44and very often you don't have a sense of what came before you and how it got there,
00:45:49and you certainly don't know what's going to come after.
00:45:51And when I walked into design as a student at Tyler School of Art,
00:45:57what struck me was sort of two separate cultures of design.
00:46:03One was the corporate culture, and the corporate culture was the visual language of big corporations,
00:46:10and at that time they were persuasively Hervetica.
00:46:13And they looked alike. They looked a little fascistic to me.
00:46:16They were clean. It reminded me of cleaning up your room.
00:46:19I felt like this was some conspiracy of my mother's to make me keep the house clean,
00:46:25you know, that all my messy room adolescent rebellion was coming back at me in this form of Helvetica,
00:46:31and I had to overthrow it.
00:46:33Hey, I got some printouts of the stuff from last night.
00:46:38I also was morally opposed to Helvetica because I viewed the big corporations that were, you know,
00:46:44slathered in Helvetica as, you know, sponsors of the Vietnam War.
00:46:48So therefore, if you used Helvetica, it meant that you were in favor of the Vietnam War,
00:46:53so how could you use it?
00:46:56Wow.
00:46:57What looked cool to me at that point were record album covers, zigzag rolling papers,
00:47:04you know, sort of the accoutrements of dope life and counterculture,
00:47:07obviously underground newspapers and magazines, and Pushpin Studios.
00:47:14Pushpin Studios was the height of, at the time I was in college, everybody's ambition to work there,
00:47:21to do work that was as inspiring as there were,
00:47:24because it seemed fresh and alive and witty and content-laden,
00:47:30aside from the fact that Seymour, Quasta, Milton Glaser could really draw.
00:47:36And I wanted to make work that looked like that.
00:47:40When I was a tiler, I wanted to be an illustrator,
00:47:43and I had a teacher named Stanislaw Sigorski,
00:47:46and I never knew quite what to do with the typography on my designs.
00:47:52We would make book covers or record covers of school projects,
00:47:55and I would go to the local art store and go to Sam Flax,
00:47:58and I'd buy Helvetica as press type,
00:48:00and I'd rub it down on the corner of the album,
00:48:02the way I thought it was supposed to be, kind of flush left.
00:48:04And, of course, it would never line up properly,
00:48:06and the thing would crackle and break and really be terrible.
00:48:10And, uh,
00:48:10Zagorski told me to let go of the press type
00:48:14and illustrate the type.
00:48:20And it hadn't dawned on me
00:48:23that typography could have personality the way drawing did.
00:48:26I realized that type had spirit
00:48:31and could convey mood
00:48:32and that it could be your own medium,
00:48:36that it was its own palette,
00:48:38a broad palette to express all kinds of things.
00:48:41So, I painted this, uh, cover for the, um, AIGA Annual,
00:48:53and the title of the AIGA Annual was Graphic Design USA,
00:48:56and I decided that I would take the title literally
00:48:59and sort of analyze what Graphic Design USA was.
00:49:03So, I decided what I'd do
00:49:05is I'd list every state in the United States
00:49:08and the percentage of people who used Helvetica.
00:49:11And I didn't have any scientific evidence
00:49:13of knowing what percentage of people
00:49:15in each state used Helvetica,
00:49:16so I decided to base it on
00:49:18the last Reagan election,
00:49:21and so that the states that went for Reagan
00:49:23all had more than 50% of the people
00:49:26who used Helvetica.
00:49:28If Helvetica was the typeface of the Vietnam War,
00:49:31what's the typeface of this war?
00:49:33The Iraqi War?
00:49:34Yeah.
00:49:34Helvetica.
00:49:38Same time period.
00:49:40I mean, it is.
00:49:41It's the same.
00:49:41It repeated.
00:49:42That's why we're there.
00:49:44Helvetica caused it.
00:49:48And so in the postmodern period,
00:49:50designers were breaking things up.
00:49:52They wanted to get away
00:49:53from the orderly, clean, smooth surface of design,
00:49:57the horrible slickness of it all as they saw it,
00:50:01and produce something that had vitality.
00:50:03I myself got fairly disappointed
00:50:17with modernism in general.
00:50:21It simply became boring.
00:50:24If I see a brochure now with lots of white space
00:50:27that has, you know, like six lines of Helvetica
00:50:30up on the top and a little, you know,
00:50:33sort of like abstract logo on the bottom
00:50:36and a picture of a businessman walking somewhere,
00:50:42the overall communication that that says to me is
00:50:46do not read me because I will bore the shit out of you.
00:50:52Not just visually, but also in content
00:50:54because the content will likely say the same
00:50:57as it says to me visually.
00:51:03I was in terrible rock bands
00:51:05when I was 15, 16, 17,
00:51:08and I think through that experience
00:51:11got close to the album cover
00:51:14and essentially I went to art school
00:51:17because of album covers.
00:51:20I probably was the last generation
00:51:22that got taught doing everything by hand.
00:51:25So, you know, I mean,
00:51:27we drew 10-point type with a brush.
00:51:32In general, I was always fairly bored
00:51:35in, you know, looking at type books
00:51:38and deciding over and over again
00:51:41which type to pick for a certain project.
00:51:44It just didn't seem a very interesting task to do.
00:51:48So here and there, I think with the records,
00:51:55with the CD covers, we started to do our own type
00:51:58and I think there was one instance
00:52:02that was for a Lou Reed cover
00:52:04where this hand-drawn typography resonated
00:52:08and numerous projects came out in that vein
00:52:12in all sorts of directions,
00:52:14you know, in a more funny direction
00:52:16and in a more serious direction
00:52:18where at one time our intern carved a hand type
00:52:24into my skin for a lecture poster.
00:52:28The type in an instant, in a single image,
00:52:32tells the story of its making,
00:52:34tells you about its process
00:52:36in a very elegant way, in a very fast way.
00:52:42That typography strangely became so well-known
00:52:46just within the design community, of course,
00:52:48that some people thought that that's all we do.
00:52:53Which, thankfully, is not the case.
00:53:08Well, I always thought that that approach
00:53:09of people using only three or four typefaces
00:53:12is very suspect.
00:53:14I think this could be interesting to do
00:53:17for a single project
00:53:18as an exercise to put up additional limitations
00:53:23in order to focus yourself.
00:53:25But as a strategy over a lifetime,
00:53:29I think it's akin to a writer saying,
00:53:33I'm only going to write in three or four words.
00:53:36Yes, you probably could do it,
00:53:37but for one, why would you?
00:53:40And for the second,
00:53:41would it really yield an interesting body of work
00:53:46over a lifetime?
00:54:02Designers wanted to express their subjectivity,
00:54:06their own feelings about the world,
00:54:08their sense that they had something to say
00:54:11through design,
00:54:12through the design choices they make.
00:54:14And, of course, this caused controversy.
00:54:17If you take a figure like Massimo Vignelli,
00:54:20who'd been one of the 60s high priests
00:54:24with his company Unimark,
00:54:26it's right there in the name, Unimark,
00:54:28the idea of a uniform kind of expression.
00:54:31When he looked at this new work,
00:54:33this expressive, subjective, wayward,
00:54:37to his way of thinking,
00:54:38irrational new way of designing,
00:54:40it seemed like the barbarians
00:54:43were not only at the gate,
00:54:44but they'd stormed through
00:54:45and they'd taken over.
00:54:46In the 70s,
00:54:48the young generation was after psychedelic type,
00:54:51you know,
00:54:51and all the junk that you can find.
00:54:54And also in the 80s,
00:54:55you know,
00:54:56with their mind completely confused
00:54:58by that disease
00:55:01that was called postmodernism,
00:55:02the people were just going around
00:55:07like chicken without their heads
00:55:08by using all kinds of typefaces
00:55:11that could come around
00:55:12that could say not modern,
00:55:15in a sense.
00:55:16They didn't know what they were caring for.
00:55:19They only knew about what they were against,
00:55:22you know,
00:55:22and what they were against was Helvetica.
00:55:24I have no formal training in the field.
00:55:42In my case,
00:55:43I never learned all the things
00:55:44I wasn't supposed to do.
00:55:46I just did what made sense to me.
00:55:47I was just experimenting, really.
00:55:56So when people started getting really upset,
00:55:59I didn't really understand why.
00:56:00I didn't say,
00:56:00well, what's the big deal?
00:56:02What are you talking about?
00:56:03And it was many years later
00:56:05that somebody explained to me,
00:56:07probably better than I can explain it now,
00:56:09is that basically there was this group
00:56:11that spent a lot of time
00:56:13trying to organize things
00:56:15and get some kind of system going,
00:56:17and they saw me as coming in
00:56:18and throwing that out the window,
00:56:20which I might have done,
00:56:23but it wasn't the starting point
00:56:24and it wasn't the plan.
00:56:27And, you know,
00:56:28it was only much later
00:56:29did I learn, you know,
00:56:30what terms modernism
00:56:32and this and that.
00:56:34Ray Gunn Magazine
00:56:35was very much experimental.
00:56:38It was completely experimental.
00:56:39Every issue would try a lot of things
00:56:42and a lot of them worked
00:56:44and a lot of them didn't work.
00:56:45I never saw proof,
00:56:47so a lot of times
00:56:48there were just mistakes,
00:56:49flat-out mistakes,
00:56:50that people would write long essays
00:56:52on why I did this black type
00:56:55on a black boot or something.
00:56:56And it was,
00:56:57no, I never saw proof.
00:56:58What are you talking about?
00:57:00It's very hard to do
00:57:01the more subjective,
00:57:03interpretive stuff well.
00:57:05You know,
00:57:05I can teach anybody off the street
00:57:07how to design
00:57:08a reasonable business card,
00:57:10newsletter,
00:57:11but if I bring the same group
00:57:13off the street in
00:57:14and play a CD
00:57:15and say,
00:57:16okay, now let's interpret
00:57:17that music for a cover.
00:57:19Well,
00:57:19nine out of ten people
00:57:20are going to be lost
00:57:21and are going to do something
00:57:22really corny and expected
00:57:24and one person
00:57:25is going to do something amazing
00:57:26because that music spoke to them
00:57:29and it sent them
00:57:29in some direction
00:57:30that nobody else could go.
00:57:32And that's the area to me
00:57:34where it gets more interesting
00:57:35and exciting
00:57:36and more emotional
00:57:38and that's where
00:57:40the best work comes from.
00:57:42This is an article
00:57:43on the singer Brian Ferry
00:57:45and when I read the article
00:57:47it was very much like
00:57:48so many of these others
00:57:50I had read.
00:57:51It's like,
00:57:51oh man,
00:57:52you know,
00:57:53how disappointing,
00:57:54how boring.
00:57:55I went through all my fonts
00:57:56which at the time
00:57:57would have been
00:57:57hundreds and hundreds.
00:57:59Well,
00:58:00still is for that matter
00:58:01but
00:58:01and didn't find one
00:58:03that seemed to fit
00:58:04when I kind of discussed
00:58:06and boredom
00:58:07with this article
00:58:08and I finally came
00:58:09to the bottom
00:58:09and there was Dingbat.
00:58:11Of course now
00:58:11it's Zap Dingbat
00:58:12so literally the last one
00:58:14and I was like,
00:58:15well,
00:58:16it's boring.
00:58:17It's not worth reading.
00:58:18Why not do it
00:58:19in Zap Dingbat?
00:58:20That's a font.
00:58:21So it was,
00:58:22it's all set.
00:58:24In Dingbat
00:58:25it is the actual font.
00:58:26You could highlight it
00:58:27and make it Helvetica
00:58:28or something
00:58:29and you'd be able
00:58:30to read it
00:58:30but it really wouldn't
00:58:32be worthwhile.
00:58:32It's not very well written.
00:58:33Don't confuse legibility
00:58:37with communication
00:58:38and just because
00:58:39something's legible
00:58:40doesn't mean it communicates
00:58:41and more importantly
00:58:42doesn't mean it communicates
00:58:44the right thing
00:58:45and vice versa.
00:58:48Something by being
00:58:49maybe difficult
00:58:49to initially read
00:58:50may be sending
00:58:51a completely different message
00:58:52that is valid
00:58:53for where it's being used
00:58:55and that may require
00:58:56a little more time
00:58:57or the involvement
00:58:59of the reader
00:58:59but it almost seems
00:59:03stronger the other way
00:59:04if something is
00:59:05a very important message
00:59:06and it's said
00:59:07in a boring,
00:59:10nondescript way
00:59:11then the message
00:59:12can be lost.
00:59:14I mean,
00:59:14that doesn't say
00:59:15caffeinated.
00:59:17It's just like,
00:59:18hello?
00:59:21Why not?
00:59:23It's just sitting there.
00:59:24There's nothing
00:59:25caffeinated about it.
00:59:26There's nothing
00:59:27extramarital about that.
00:59:30There's no sunshine here.
00:59:33That's no fun.
00:59:34That's not a fun sandlot.
00:59:37Where's the explosion?
00:59:39This could be the first date.
00:59:41This might be close.
00:59:42These buses are kind of boring.
00:59:45It's a very thin line
00:59:47between simple
00:59:47and clean
00:59:49and powerful
00:59:49and simple
00:59:50and clean
00:59:51and boring.
00:59:53That was
00:59:55sort of the rise
00:59:56of what's referred to
00:59:58as kind of
00:59:58grunge typography.
01:00:00That became
01:00:01an all-consuming aesthetic
01:00:03for about
01:00:03two, three, four, five years
01:00:05as that trend
01:00:07worked its way down
01:00:07from the masters
01:00:08who originated it
01:00:09to anyone
01:00:11who sort of
01:00:11already had a tendency
01:00:13to make mistakes
01:00:14and all of a sudden
01:00:14found that they looked
01:00:15good now
01:00:16instead of incompetent
01:00:17which is the way
01:00:17they looked the day before.
01:00:20Typography
01:00:20was so broken
01:00:22by the end
01:00:23of the grunge period.
01:00:24You know,
01:00:24just lying there
01:00:25in a twisted heap
01:00:26all rules cast aside
01:00:29no apparent way forward
01:00:30that all those designers
01:00:32could perhaps do
01:00:33by the late 90s
01:00:34was to go back
01:00:36to return
01:00:37to an earlier way
01:00:38of designing
01:00:39but with a new set
01:00:41of theories
01:00:41to support it.
01:00:43for us
01:01:11modernism does have
01:01:12more subversive
01:01:14sides
01:01:14I think
01:01:15that whole image
01:01:16of modernism
01:01:17is something
01:01:18that is primarily
01:01:19concerned with
01:01:20functionalism
01:01:21utilitarianism
01:01:23that is something
01:01:25that emerged
01:01:25much later
01:01:26that was more
01:01:27a late modernist
01:01:28thing
01:01:28or something
01:01:29I think
01:01:29the early modernist
01:01:30movements
01:01:31like dataism
01:01:32futurism
01:01:33surrealism
01:01:34that sort of
01:01:34things
01:01:35all had
01:01:35their more
01:01:36subversive sides
01:01:37and their more
01:01:38how do you call it
01:01:40more dialectical sides
01:01:42that went
01:01:43against something
01:01:44it's not that
01:01:52we are against
01:01:53that experimentation
01:01:54that people
01:01:55such as
01:01:55David Carson
01:01:57and Amy Gray
01:01:58and Fuse
01:01:59that Neffel Brody did
01:02:01we think
01:02:02what we do
01:02:02is a sort of
01:02:03extension of that
01:02:04all that
01:02:05hunting
01:02:06to the next
01:02:07typeface
01:02:08every time
01:02:08it took a lot
01:02:09of energy
01:02:10and I can still
01:02:11remember
01:02:11as students
01:02:12that you were
01:02:13really disappointed
01:02:14because you wanted
01:02:15to use a certain typeface
01:02:16and then you saw
01:02:17somebody else
01:02:18used it
01:02:18and then you
01:02:19couldn't use it
01:02:19because you wanted
01:02:20to be original
01:02:21and with Helvetica
01:02:22this whole problem
01:02:22is non-existent
01:02:23because
01:02:23everybody is using
01:02:25Helvetica
01:02:25a lot of people
01:02:27see the way
01:02:29that a young generation
01:02:30of designers
01:02:31use a typeface
01:02:32such as Helvetica
01:02:32as a more superficial way
01:02:34as a sort of appropriation
01:02:35of a style
01:02:36I think we would
01:02:38very much disagree
01:02:39with that
01:02:39I think all three of us
01:02:40grew up in the 70s
01:02:42and in the Netherlands
01:02:43which was dominated
01:02:44by the last moment
01:02:46of late modernism
01:02:48for example
01:02:49the city I was born
01:02:50and grew up
01:02:51Rotterdam
01:02:51that logotype
01:02:53was designed
01:02:54by Wim Kruil
01:02:55the stems
01:02:56were designed
01:02:57by Kruil
01:02:58the telephone book
01:02:59was designed
01:03:00by Kruil
01:03:00the atlas
01:03:01that you use
01:03:01in school
01:03:01was designed
01:03:02by Kruil
01:03:02so for us
01:03:03it is almost
01:03:04like a sort of
01:03:05natural
01:03:06mother tongue
01:03:07that's something
01:03:08really natural
01:03:09it's not that we
01:03:10I mean a lot of people
01:03:11think you sort of
01:03:12study it from books
01:03:14and then copy it
01:03:15or something
01:03:15but I would really say
01:03:17that it's almost
01:03:18in our blood
01:03:19it's also funny
01:03:22because a lot of people
01:03:23connect Helvetica
01:03:24sometimes with the
01:03:26sort of dangers
01:03:26of globalization
01:03:27and standardization
01:03:29I'm not afraid
01:03:31for that quality
01:03:32at all
01:03:32because I just know
01:03:34that everybody
01:03:35can put their own
01:03:36twist on it
01:03:37I think that
01:03:37you can put
01:03:38as much nationality
01:03:40in the spacing
01:03:41of a typeface
01:03:43as in a typeface
01:03:43itself
01:03:44or something
01:03:44and I think
01:03:45the way people
01:03:45like Kruil
01:03:46use Helvetica
01:03:46is typically Dutch
01:03:47I think
01:03:48and that's why
01:03:49I'm never really
01:03:50impressed by the
01:03:51sort of argument
01:03:53that Helvetica
01:03:54is this sort of
01:03:55global monster
01:03:57sort of
01:07:08One of the things I've always really wanted to design is an airplane signage, sort of an identity for an airline.
01:07:17I'd love to do, like, uniforms or, you know, you know, sort of seats and, you know, the whole thing, you know, trucks and, you know, that kind of thing I just think would be brilliant, you know, to sort of, you know, I've done these little 12-inch sleeves for long.
01:07:31I want to go a little bit bigger scale now, you know.
01:07:35It's that idea that something's designed to stand the test of time.
01:07:39Hopefully, some of the things that I've designed will be still being used, you know, in 20, 30 years. I'd love to think that.
01:07:47I got married about three years ago. I did the wedding invites, which, believe me, is just the worst job you could ever do as a graphic designer, but I've done other people's wedding invites and I'll never do one again.
01:08:02It's the most stressful job I've ever had. Dealing with mother-in-laws, you know, is just horrific, but, yeah, I did. I did hours.
01:08:10And on the order of service, I did a little credit to give thanks to Max Meidinger for Helvetica, but my wife vetoed that and I had to take it off the invite, but, yeah, it was funny.
01:08:32I think I fell in the, sort of, step of Helvetica when I was at DR.
01:08:40I always really enjoy using Helvetica because some people say, you know, they use a different typeface because it has this, gives a different feeling.
01:08:51And I really enjoy the challenge of, sort of, making Helvetica speak in a different way.
01:08:56You know, it's been around, you know, 50 years coming up. It's just as fresh as it was, you know, and obviously it wasn't intended to be, you know, this cool thing, but it's just a beautiful font.
01:09:09It's just a beautiful thing.
01:09:22I don't know.
01:09:58Well, we are less obsessed with Helvetica than we used to be.
01:10:23Yeah, we were really obsessed with Helvetica, but not more so much.
01:10:31We accepted somehow.
01:10:33We came to a point where we accepted that it's just there.
01:10:53We like restrictions.
01:11:10We can't operate, we can't do nothing without restrictions.
01:11:14The more restrictions we have, the more happy we are.
01:11:16When we started school, the influences in graphic design was really like Brody and Carson.
01:11:24It's only after that we really looked at Josef Müller-Brockmann's work and 60s Swiss typography.
01:11:33When we started the office, we really said that we wanted to look more back and to find more structured design.
01:11:45For us, it's very important to reduce the elements we use.
01:11:53When it comes to type, we will only use, if possible, one typeface, or like two, and if possible, we will use one size.
01:12:01We don't like humanistic typefaces, for example.
01:12:05We like a little bit, it must be more rational, because otherwise they have too much expression.
01:12:11We think that Helvetica contains somehow a design program.
01:12:24It will lead you to a certain language also.
01:12:27And this is also one of the secrets of the success of Helvetica, that in itself it has a certain style and a certain aesthetic that you will just use it like that, you know, because of the typeface, because the typeface wants it like that.
01:12:46You will do what the typeface wants you to do.
01:12:48If you are not a good designer, just use Helvetica bolt in one size, like for a flyer, it looks good.
01:13:18Helvetica bolt in one size, like for a flyer, it looks good.
01:13:48So it may very well be that when it comes to trends, at least in graphic design, we've reached sort of, you know, the end of history.
01:14:06And the pendulum that swings back and forth doesn't have any more directions it can swing in.
01:14:10The final trend may simply be the completely democratic distribution of the means of production to anyone who wants it or anyone who can afford it.
01:14:23You can have a music studio for a couple of thousand bucks.
01:14:26You can have a film studio for 10 grand.
01:14:29And you definitely can be a designer with one or two thousand dollars and have basically similar tools than the people who do this for a living.
01:14:41If all these people have the tools to make good design, they realize that it ain't that easy.
01:14:46You know, it's not just opening a template in CorelDRAW or in PowerPoint.
01:14:49You know, it's not about having the latest version of whatever program.
01:14:54If you don't have the eye, if you don't have a sense of design, the program's not going to give it to you.
01:15:01I remember years ago, a friend of mine who produced radio commercials had five guys go out in the hallway of CBS Records and sing the beginning of Round, Round, Get Around, I Get Around by the Beach Boys.
01:15:16And they really tried.
01:15:17They rehearsed for a week to get their harmonies right.
01:15:20And they were the best vocalists who worked in that department on that floor.
01:15:24And they loved music.
01:15:25And they went out and they sang it.
01:15:26And, of course, they were totally flat and it sounded horribly terrible.
01:15:30But, you know, they had rehearsed.
01:15:31And then, of course, the voiceover for the career commercial said, now you can appreciate the Beach Boys.
01:15:36And it's really sort of the same thing.
01:15:38I mean, the more you, the more, the closer you come to it, the more you see it, the more you can appreciate it when it's terrific.
01:15:45There are more good young type designers, by young I mean probably late 20s, early 30s now, than at any time in history.
01:15:53So who knows what typefaces they will design in terms of style and so on.
01:15:57But they'll be good.
01:15:58And, you know, to my way of thinking, that is a huge gain, a huge benefit that comes with this more democratic, more accessible technology.
01:16:08There's just something about Helvetica.
01:16:14Something about the fact that people keep saying, I've come up with an improvement of Helvetica.
01:16:18And it never is really good.
01:16:21You know, I wonder whether or not somehow there's some whole undiscovered science of typography that sort of would say that it's not just because we're used to seeing it.
01:16:31It's not just because it was associated with all these things that we consider authoritative.
01:16:36But it somehow has this kind of inherent rightness, you know, the rightness of the way the lowercase a meets the curve, the rightness of the way the g has a thing that comes down, the rightness of the way the c strokes are like that instead of like that.
01:16:51You know, I mean, I wouldn't have believed that those things actually could be right or wrong as opposed to someone's taste.
01:16:59Yet you sort of have nearly 50 years of a history of the thing just sitting there daring people to fix it.
01:17:06And it seems to be unfixable.
01:17:12It's always changing.
01:17:13Time is changing.
01:17:15The appreciation of typefaces is changing very much.
01:17:18Why you grab a certain typeface for a certain job has a different meaning than we grab the typeface in the 50s for a certain job.
01:17:29It's, it's, it's, you are always a child of your time and you cannot step out of that.
01:17:35What we have is a climate now in which the very idea of visual communication and graphic design, if we still want to call it that, is accepted by many more people.
01:17:53They get it.
01:17:54They understand it.
01:17:55They're starting to see graphic communication as an expression of their own identity.
01:18:02And the classic case of this is the social networking program, such as MySpace, where you can customize your profile.
01:18:14You can change the background.
01:18:15You can put pictures in.
01:18:17You can change the typeface to anything you want.
01:18:19And those choices, those decisions you make become expressions of who you are.
01:18:26You, you start to care about it in the way that you care about the clothing you're wearing as an expression of who you are or your haircut or whatever, or how you decorate your apartment.
01:18:38All of those things, you know, we, we accept the idea of identity being expressed in that way through these consumer choices.
01:18:45Well, now it's happening in the sphere of visual communication.
01:18:49And there's no reason, as the tools become ever more sophisticated, why this just won't go on developing and developing and developing.
01:19:15We'll see you next time.