During my studies at the art school I became more aware of the importance of typography in art, graphic design, advertisements, articles and its influence on our perception on text and visual culture. The type, size, position, … of your text are all aspects you have to consider when making your design. Choosing which font is the most appropriate for my artwork, is still one of my main obstacles, especially when there is an endless offer of fonts available on the net. On some pages you can download them free, on others you can only purchase them by buying them. In this post I want to share some stuff I picked up at art school.

One of my favourite inspirational sites is House Industries, an American design studio specialised in fonts. And they have a great catalogue of fonts! However you may only use them if you buy them. Which is very rightfully because these people work their butts off designing these fonts. Go check it out, it’s a great source for inspiration.

Another interesting website is Identifont, where you can find the name of your font of interest by answering a set of questions. Really usefull when you’re discussing about the typography of a design with other people.

Most people still underestimate the impact of fonts on our culture/life. The most famous example of the phenomenon is Helvetica.

It is designed in 1957 by Swiss Max Miedeinger and it is among the most widely used sans serif typeface. It is a popular choice for commercial word marks such as American Airlines, 3M, Microsoft, etc…

Something remarkable: most of these logos have never been changed because helvetica is timeless. These logos still work, so why change them? However helvetica can be an easy choice of font: ‘ let’s take helvetica because then we’re sure our design will work’. In my opinion not a great approach as a designer. A font has to be seen in its context, it can give your text that extra touch. Because of its simplicity and neutralism, helvetica can mean many things but does not necessarily give that something extra.

Some people love it, some people hate it. This was the main idea of the documentary Helvetica ( Yes, there is a movie about the font). Check the trailer here below:

I really recommend this movie. You’ll be surprised how ubiquitous helvetica is in our daily lives. It also shows the history and use of the font throughout the years. Several graphic designers give their own interesting opinion. However, eventually it’s mainly a discussion between modernism and post modernism. Helvetica was developed in a modern period where everything was defined by a set of rules. The helvetica ‘haters’ in this movie were post-modernists who react against the uniformity and dullness of modernism.

I had a class once about the helvetica discussion in which we had to say if we were helvetica lovers or haters. I chose to be helvetica lover, this was my design for that class:

O.K. I chose the helvetica font but I gave it a twist and tried to use it in a post-modernist context.

Now it’s up to you: what’s your opinion about helvetica? Do you like it or are you sick of seeing it everywhere?

Ow yeah, in case you were searching helvetica in your text editor: a lot of companies who didn’t want to buy the licensees, used clones of helvetica. The most known copy is Arial…

Tagged: font, helvetica, typography