Helvetica

Back from the long vacation.

Where to begin? So much has happened here in the past 2 weeks, it's incredible. Jack Abramoff the turncoat threatens even more Republicans in high places [Yes, Democrats too]. The President has decided to further reinforce his "mandate" to reclaim supposed Presidential powers by using his powers of recess appointment to ram more corrupt, inept, ridiculous BushCo. cronies into many open positions across the board [you thought you had a say in government]. But he has decided to consult with some of the most experienced and knowledgable people in the country today: former Secretaries of State and Defense- five years too late and only to sell them on his moronic Iraq non-agenda [how much will this war cost, Mr. President? $100-200 million, mostly subsidized by the bountiful Iraqi oil industry? Or did you just mispeak back then and intend to say $1.4 trillion?]

Big Cheese Cheney still says that the government needs to tap the communications of "suspects." Despite the fact that the FISA court would allow them that capability regardless and was set up to with the express purpose of ensuring governmental wiretaps had enough secrecy while protecting American citizens. Cheney keeps picking a pretty dispicable side of the fight in the War on Terror. It's becoming clearer that in that war there are Terrorists who hate us, the Government who spies on us and apparently hates us as well, and we're stuck in the middle. Tons of fun.

Bill O'Reilly is incapable of getting along with anybody.

And anybody who was watching the media nightmare that took place as we all thought 12 miners might have miraculously survived, only to learn that, in fact, it was misinformation and only 1 miner survived... wow... Our hearts to the families of this terrible event...

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But I want to talk about something important- something that really digs to the heart of politics, history, and arts in America today.

Fonts.

The NYT ran a great story about the misuse in Good Night, and Good Luck of the font Helvetica [which looks like Arial, but isn't, because Microsoft wanted to get out of paying for Helvetica stuck us all with an inferior font] and about the obsessions of the purists who get off on exposing misused fonts in cinema.

"Good Night, and Good Luck," the movie about Edward R. Murrow's battle to expose the demagoguery of Joseph R. McCarthy, has received both critical and popular acclaim. But the movie has its fervent detractors - and they aren't people nostalgic for the days of backyard fallout shelters. They are typographers and graphic designers. Their charge: typographical inaccuracy.

It appears that the CBS News sign, prominently displayed in the film's carefully reconstructed New York newsroom, uses the typeface Helvetica. But Helvetica was not designed until 1957, the year McCarthy died. The movie takes place in the early 1950's.

"I thought it was a bit jarring," said Michael Bierut, a graphic designer at Pentagram Studio in New York. "After all, even in 1957, Helvetica was an exotica Swiss import."

He's not the only one. And "Good Night, and Good Luck" isn't the only malefactor. Hollywood features that spend millions on period production design are often rife with inaccurate typography. And among a certain segment of the audience - a certain very narrow segment of the audience - that is an outrage.

INDEED! AN OUTRAGE!

I, for one, find nothing more disrupting to my movie-viewing experience as the lurching halt my brain comes to when jarred out of a film narrative by the visual onslaught an inappropriate font. Anybody see the clearly ridiculous use of Papyrus in "The Family Stone?" Awful.

Okay. I'm kidding. But there is something to this- if you go for historical context and accuracy, you should really have your production designers consider the typefaces.

How do you answer that claim, Liberal-Establishment Mr. Clooney? The claim that you don't care about fonts?! [Because if you don't care about fonts, you are clearly exposed as the hypocrite you must be] Mr. Simonson, a font designer and historian, who runs a fantastic website, chimes in:

I was very happy to be included in a short article in today’s New York Times (Good Film, Shame About the Helvetica) about designers who notice anachronistic font choices in films, but I was a bit taken aback when I received an email first thing this morning from the art director of Good Night, And Good Luck. She pointed out that Helvetica was not used in the film, contrary to what was claimed in the article. She said, rather, that the sign shown in the example frame was set in Akzidenz Grotesk, a face which predated (and in fact was the basis for) Helvetica, and that this choice was based on extensive research of CBS’s graphic design during the period depicted in the film.

This is no skin off my nose since I have not made any comments (yet) about the use of type in Good Night, And Good Luck. The comment was made by graphic designer and fellow font flub finder Michael Bierut, who, along with Scott Stowell and myself, is quoted in the article. Judging from the still shown in the article, I might have come to the same conclusion. As it happens, I missed the film when it was in theaters and will have to wait for the DVD release to see for myself.

If what she says is true (and she was very adamant about it), it is very unfortunate that Good Night, And Good Luck was chosen as the lead example in the article. Especially since its art director appears to be one of the rare people working in film who cares about getting the type details right.

Update: Thanks to some detective work by Stephen Coles, as reported at The Design Observer and Typophile.com, it has been confirmed that Good Night, And Good Luck really does use Akzidenz Grotesk.

AHA!

er....

[Let's just chalk this one up to bad reporting. They seem to be good at messing things up these days.]
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Edited to correct publication date