I found Helvetica to be a very interesting documentary. I would never have thought myself capable of being able to watch an hour long documentary about a typeface.
Helvetica is a very interesting typeface itself, as it is so widely used, and so many different people have different opinions about it. Being very impressionable, I found myself loving Helvetica, then hating it, then loving it again and at the end of the documentary I really wasn’t sure how I felt about the typeface at all. It is like air, someone said in the documentary, you don’t notice it, it’s just there.
I personally think that the difference between what critics and lovers of Helvetica lies not in the design of the typeface, but in the context surrounding it. THe adoption of Helvetica as a marketing tool by major corporations has led the typeface to acquire a certain amount of baggage, despite it’s quality of being so neutral. I still did enjoy the perspectives of the “haters” of Helvetica, although I think the claim that Helvetica is a driving force behind American imperialism is a little bit of an exaggeration. I did find it interesting that Helvetica was developed from a typeface called Akzidenz Grotesk, which although it probably doesn’t mean it, I read as a grotesque accident.
No matter how you view the typeface, you can’t deny that Helvetica is a remarkable typeface as is has swept through our culture largely unnoticed by the masses.