Helvetica
Massimo Vignelli
Some notable Vignelli quotes from the movie:
“The life of a designer is a life of fight – fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor who fights against disease, [but] for us, visual disease is what we have around and we try to cure it somehow with design.”
And...
“A good typographer always has a sensibility about the distance between the letters. We think typography is black and white. Typography is really white. It’s not even black. It is the space between the blacks that really makes it. In essence, it’s like music. It’s not the notes. It’s the space between the notes that makes the music.”
In the DVD Extras, Massimo regarding the hippie movement and “design” therein, or lack thereof (in broken Italian accent):
“It certainly was a bad moment. A wasted generation – completely wasted. It’s amazing. There was nothing. They were becoming bums. The whole idea was that if you were with it, you weren’t cool. You were a bum. They were laying on the sidewalk there – all the kinds of things that went against anything that made sense. If it made sense, you have to do the opposite. That was basically it. I was talking with a guy the other night that was doing a magazine called ‘Punk’. He said a thing that was absolutely correct. He said, ‘We were not for anything. We were against anything.’ That sums up the entire generation of that time.”
Erik Spiekermann
Spiekermann’s exposition about Arial is also gold:
“It (Arial) can’t be a good typeface. What happens is that Helvetica, in and of itself, is perfect. For what it is, it is perfect. It has been improved a few times. The Helvetica we look at today is not what we looked at in 1957. It really is great. A lot of people have invested a lot of skills in it. Then somebody like Microsoft, the company without any taste, as Steve Jobs once said [and as anyone can plainly see], they go out and they say, ‘OK, this [Helvetica] is very successful, for some reason, Steve Jobs put it on the first Macintosh, the PostScript printer, and in the 13 core fonts, one of which was Helvetica.’ For whatever reason – perhaps they had a Linotype specimen there – we don’t know. [Perhaps because] it was generic. ‘We need this. It is a standard. We cannot not have it. But we aren’t going to pay Linotype any money for it because we’re Microsoft. We’re going to ask somebody (in this case, Monotype in England) to design it for us, but not design it for us.’ In other words, we take the width, so the space that every character takes, from Helvetica and we slightly change the characters. Of course, if you have a perfect typeface and you change it, it can’t go better. There is no better than perfect. It can only get worse. QED. It went worse. The poor guys, Robert Nicholas and Patricia, who did it at Monotype, I feel sort of sorry for them because you can’t win! If someone gave me Helvetica to redesign, I would refuse. If I was employed at Monotype, I probably couldn’t refuse, so they didn’t refuse, so they made it worse.”
He goes on to say what an awful company Microsoft is for not simply paying licensing fees to Linotype. “This is why I will not touch a Microsoft product. $37 Billion in the bank and you can’t pay Linotype licensing fees? They are just baddies.”
Filed under Design
