“Clean.” “Clear.” “Efficient.”
“Default.” “Neutral.” “Clarity.”
HELVETICA. Helvetica is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann. Helvetica was developed in 1957 by Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) of Münchenstein, Switzerland. Haas set out to design a new sans-serif typeface that could compete with the successful Akzidenz-Grotesk in the Swiss market. Originally called Neue Haas Grotesk, its design was based on Schelter-Grotesk and Haas’ Normal Grotesk. The aim of the new design was to create a neutral typeface that had great clarity, no intrinsic meaning in its form, and could be used on a wide variety of signage. When Linotype adopted Neue Haas Grotesk (which was never planned to be a full range of mechanical and hot-metal typefaces) its design was reworked. After the success of Univers, Arthur Ritzel of Stempel redesigned Neue Haas Grotesk into a larger family.[2] In 1960, the typeface’s name was changed by Haas’ German parent company Stempel to Helvetica in order to make it more marketable internationally.
The film “Helvetica” is an independent feature-length documentary film about typography and graphic design, centered on the typeface Helvetica. Directed by Gary Hustwit, the film goes into great depth about how Helvetica changed the Graphic Design industry and how some people love it, and some people hate it. The first thing you will learn from watching it, is that Helvetica is everywhere. It’s just there. It’s timeless. Helvetica was created to spell out “modern.” Also, after WWII designers had social responsibility to reconstruct and rational typfaces were needed. As Wim Crouwel said, Helvetica had “clarity” and it was “clear, readable and straight forward.” Typography is a way of creating order, and this was desperately needed then.
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement in the arts, its set of cultural tendencies and associated cultural movements, originally arising from widescale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World War I, were among the factors that shaped Modernism. In art, Modernism explicitly rejects the ideology of realism and makes use of the works of the past, through the application of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms. Modernism also rejects the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking, as well as the idea of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator. In general, the term Modernism encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. The modernist movement, at the beginning of the 20th century, marked the first time that the term avant-garde, with which the movement was labelled until the word “modernism� prevailed, was used for the arts (rather than in its original military and political context).
David Carson is an American graphic designer, art director and surfer. He is best known for his innovative magazine design, and use of experimental typography. Carson was perhaps the most influential graphic designer of the 1990s. In particular, his widely imitated aesthetic defined the so-called "grunge typography" era. Carson became the art director of Transworld Skateboarding magazine in 1984, and remained there until 1988, helping to give the magazine a distinctive look. By the end of his tenure there he had developed his signature style, using “dirty” type and non-mainstream photographic techniques. He was also the art director of a spinoff magazine, Transworld Snowboarding, which began publishing in 1987. Steve and Debbee Pezman, publishers of Surfer magazine tapped Carson to design Beach Culture, a quarterly publication that evolved out of a to-the-trade annual supplement. Though only six quarterly issues were produced, this allowed Carson to make his first significant impact on the world of graphic design and typography— with ideas that were called innovative even by those that were not fond of his work, in which legibility often relied on readers’ strict attention. For one feature on a blind surfer, Carson opened with a two-page spread covered in black. Carson was hired by publisher Marvin Scott Jarrett to design Ray Gun, an alternative music and lifestyle magazine that debuted in 1992. In one issue, he notoriously used Dingbat, a font containing only symbols, as the font for what he considered a rather dull interview with Bryan Ferry.