Helvetica

Helvetica film still

So far on this blog the subject has been poetry, but Architrave is also about the art of type. Recently I re-watched Gary Hustwit's film Helvetica and I was reminded of some of the many commonalities between the two art forms.

Foremost is the desire for constraint. Robert Frost famously said that writing poetry without metrical form was like "playing tennis without a net." Without the limitations provided by line length, rhyme schemes, patterns of stressed syllables, etc. the poet would settle for the first thing that came to mind. The truly new and different turn of phrase would remain undiscovered, because there was nothing to prompt the poet to reach beyond their comfortable favorites. Type and graphic designers feel the same way - constraint drives them toward more creative choices, and so they welcome it. Helvetica was born out of modernism and a desire for a completely neutral typeface - a face that did not, in itself, convey a mood but would take its cues from whatever it was paired with. It eventually became so ubiquitous on corporate logos and public signage that avoiding Helvetica became a desired constraint. 

grunge typography designed by David Carson

It's interesting, too, to watch the pendulum of style and taste swing back and forth through another art form. Helvetica was born of modernism. Then in the 1990's grunge typography developed as a reaction against clean, spare text. It's the kind of visual art that is easy to imitate badly, and it reminds me of the language movement in poetry. Just as grunge typography discourages traditional registration (alignment) of letters, sometimes to the point of illegibility, language poetry discouraged the use of words in their traditional sense. The result is poetry that is very difficult to understand. Both grunge typography and language poetry are easy to imitate badly.

Last, typeface design has as much to do with white space as it does with what is filled in. How a typeface occupies or is held by the white space around it creates mood and weight (or lightness) on the page. Are the ascenders and descenders taking up a lot more space than the bodies of the letters? How wide open are the bowls on letters like O? Is there a uniform thickness to all parts of each letter, or is there a contrast between thick and thin strokes? The absences are just as significant as the presences, or as Wallace Stevens would say "the blackbird whistling/ or just after." Sound needs silence; poems, being made of sound, are no exception.