Gary Hustwit’s documentary Helvetica explores the details of what is easily the most popular typeface in the world. It is a fascinating look at not only the prevalence of the Helvetica, but also how it’s use informs about our culture. The film is gorgeously shot, is well edited, has a great soundtrack, and features a lot of amazing interviews with interesting, and informative, subjects. Hustwit really did a magnificent job with this film¹, and I think everyone — even people who couldn’t care less about Helvetica, typography in general, or design — should see it. It’s easily one of the five best films I saw this year.²

There were two things in the film that really struck me. First, Helvetica might possibly be the greatest typeface ever designed. It’s ubiquitousness is a function of it’s near universal applicability. The film goes to great lengths to give a fair voice to a dissenting view on that, but it all rolls back to the truth that every time they show Helvetica on screen it feels so nature and perfect that you forget that there might be other typefaces that could have been used instead. After acknowledging that the myth of Helvetica as the ultimate font isn’t true, typographer Jonathan Hoefler says the following:

There’s something about it that has a feeling of finality to it. This is the conclusion of one line of reasoning, was this typeface, and perhaps everything after it was secondary in some way.

I find evolutionary dead ends to be fascinating from the standpoint of: how does one continue forward when one understands that they will never exceed what has come before? In this regard, how does a type designer approach the task of creating a new sans-serif typeface when Helvetica is staring them in the face?

Matthew Carter, designer of the famous Verdana and Georgia typefaces, says, quite elegantly, in the film:

It’s very hard for a designer to look at [Helvetica's] characters and say ‘How would I improve them? How would make them any different?’ They just seem exactly right. I’m glad no one ever asked me to second guess Helvetica, because I wouldn’t know what to do.

I think there is such a thing as a perfect piece of art. That’s what typography is — a work of art. I think the question of how you move forward from a perfect work of art as what defines you as an artist. That Carter went on to produce Verdana and Georgia speaks to the quality and strength of his artistry.

Of course, this sort true in all areas of art. In film, I immediately think of the Chinese movie Infernal Affairs, and Scorsese’s remake of it, The Departed.³ Infernal Affairs is a marvelous movie. The tone is perfect. The character arcs are perfect. The plot is perfect. It is a perfect film, and every single change that Scorsese made in The Departed was, I believe, to the detriment of the story. The only thing that really worked in The Departed’s favor was the spectacular view of Boston, which is to say that the film just looked different, but not necessarily better. I don’t understand what Scorsese was thinking. What was it he was trying to get out of remaking Infernal Affairs? I guess the answer is, “an Oscar,” but what does that say if your crowning achievement is a copy of someone else’s far superior work? I guess Scorsese can start a club with the guy who copied Helvetica to make Arial.

I think this is true in writing as well. Having studied molecular biology, whenever I mentioned an interest in writing someone (like my mom) would inevitably suggest that I write a story about science. “It would make a great story,” they would say. Yes, it would. In fact, it did. It was called Jurassic Park. The story is about molecular biology, and dinosaurs. Seriously, how could I possibly compete with that? There is nothing you could clone that is more interesting than a freaking velociraptor. As a result, I have zero interest in even considering to write a scientific — let alone molecular biology based — story, because I know nothing I write will ever be better than Jurassic Park. For me, I see it as a futile endeavor, and I wonder if typographers don’t feel the same about sans-serif fonts.

This brings me to the second point of interest in Helvetica — the film takes time to examine the use of type in posters, flyers, brochures, corporate logos, street signs, government documents, album covers, MySpace, magazine covers, and soda advertisements, but there’s no mention of books. In fact, there’s only one mention by David Carson of anything even remotely related to the use of type in an article of text (granted, it’s a spectacularly awesome use of type). What does this mean for writers?

Now, I understand that in a film about Helvetica there’s not going to be much, if any, mention of literary works, where Times and it’s siblings rule. That’s not really the problem. What worries me is that the type designers themselves tended to speak about type — in general, and not specifically Helvetica — strictly in terms of its value to graphic design. This is consistent with what I’ve observed outside the film, where typography is correlated to graphic designers, and not really to writers.

The reason I got interested in type was because, as a teenager, whenever I would get writer’s block sitting at the computer I’d start fiddling with fonts. If I couldn’t imagine the next part of the story in Times I’d try it in New York. If that was a bust I’d move on to Palatino. As an adult, I’m interesting in how the typeface can affect the way in which my writing is communicated.

The way type communicates in short flashes — as in a poster or logo — seems clear to me, and Helvetica does talk about this. For a novel, which can communicate a variety of different emotions and ideas between its pages, I think this becomes more complex, and beyond what my limited understanding of typography allows me to see. Do typographers think about this when they design a type? And, I wonder, what can I learn about typography that can help me as a writer? Can it help me at all?

Ultimately, my problem is that I don’t know any typographers. Ideally, sometime in the next, oh, ten years I’d like to get a chance to sit down with a typographer with some beers and nachos and talk about how it is they approach their work. I find it difficult to even conceptualize the thought process of a type designer, and that strikes me like if a builder didn’t understand the thought process behind the guy who makes hammers. Type is the tool I use, and the people who make it are a bit of a mystery to me. In the case of Helvetica, it’s creators Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann might as well have been sorcerers. Helvetica really is a thing of wonder.

1. I don’t care what your political views may be, but there’s no way you can see a film like this and think that Michael Moore is anything more than a hack. This is quality documentary filmmaking here, folks.↩
2. It’s available from Netflix, and if you have a Windows PC you can even watch it streamed through the “Watch Instantly” feature. Honestly, I installed Windows on my Mac Pro just to use this feature, and I’m glad I did, as the original Battlestar Galactica is also available via “Watch Instantly.” Woot!↩
3. You do know The Departed is a remake, right?↩

If you’re viewing this site outside of a feed reader than you’ve undoubtedly noticed that things look a bit different here. That’s because I decided to redo my site design, flipping the contrast from light (text) on dark (background) to dark-on-light. The reason isn’t so much for aesthetics (which I think are served by the switch anyway) but more so due to OS X’s extremely poor handling of light-on-dark text.

A Quick Overview of OS X Text Rendering

The days of blocky, pixelated fonts are generally behind us¹. OS X’s Quartz graphic system improves text display by utilizing subpixel rendering, a technique which uses the natural RGB pattern of an LCD screen to improve the quality of on-screen text. Quartz’s subpixel rendering is interesting in that its results differ significantly from Microsoft’s ClearType system (included in Windows XP and turned on by default in Vista). For an anal-retentive switcher — like me — the difference between text on Windows and OS X is immediately noticeable. With the release of Safari 3 beta on Windows, which mimics OS X’s text rendering instead of the usual ClearType, the general computing community has taken note of this difference as well. Joel Spolsky wrote a good piece comparing the two methods, for those that are interested.

Ultimately, I’m a fan of Apple’s implementation, as it does an exquisite job of replicating on screen what text will look like when printed out. If I had to choose between Windows or OS X to write a book on, for example, I would go with OS X hands down, for that reason alone².

Light vs Dark

One thing Spolsky doesn’t mention is that OS X’s rendering method is optimized for dark-on-light, and reversing that has a very noticeable impact on text quality. Below is an example of OS X rendered text both light-on-dark and dark-on-light (I’ve included a Windows XP CleartType version for comparison):

OS X’s light-on-dark text appears blurrier than the dark-on-light text, whereas there appears no visible difference in quality on Windows XP. This effect on OS X can be seen more clearly by zooming in on the text.

It’s important to note that for any given letter the number of pixels in both lines is exactly the same, but the light-on-dark line shows outer pixels — like the three pixels off the bottom of the letter “o” — much more so than the dark-on-light letters do. The color fringing for OS X’s light-on-dark text is clearly much more severe than it’s dark-on-light.

While the details of the actual algorithm OS X uses are unknown to me (and let’s be honest, I probably wouldn’t be able to understand it even if it was known to me) it does appear that both the text color and the background color play a role in how OS X does its subpixel rendering. The following image shows two lines of text — the top is black and the bottom white — against grayscale backgrounds (given in HTML hex).

The dark-on-light text holds up extremely well regardless of background color. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the light-on-dark text. The white text gets cleaner (and clearer) as the background gets lighter (until it disappears, that is). This is made even more clear upon zooming into the image (data not shown).

Some Fun with OS X

There is one final thing you can do to fully see the difference at hand, though only Mac users will be able to do this. On OS X you can invert the screen by pressing Cmd-Ctrl-Option-8 ³. Do this and then refer back the first screenshot. Note that the previous light-on-dark OS X text, while now dark-on-light in color, still looks the blurrier of the two. The pixels in the light-on-dark text do not invert the same as the pixels in the dark-on-light text, suggesting quite strongly that the algorithm OS X uses favors dark-on-light text.

So?

The take home message here is that if you’re going to use light-on-dark text that’s to be viewed on OS X you need to be extra careful in choosing your colors. While you can just pick whatever colors you want and run with them on Windows, the color combinations need to be optimized for OS X viewers. For light-on-dark text it appears that lowering the contrast between text and background colors will improve legibility within a certain range.

In my case, I was really happy with the background color I’d chosen, which seems too dark to get a good light colored text against on OS X. Rather than lighten the background to a gray I opted to just switch to black text on a white background. We’ll see how long this lasts.

Of course, none of this is a problem for Windows, as all text basically looks equally sorta-OK regardless of colors. Hurray for Windows, I guess.

1. Well, I agree with John Gruber that sometimes you want a blocky, pixelated font↩
2. I should point out that there are numerous other reasons to choose OS X for writing, to the point that it’s ridiculous to not to choose OS X. I’ll probably go into more detail on that at a later date.↩
3. This effect cannot be captured via OS X’s screencapture utility, otherwise I’d show you myself.↩

John Gruber gives a great rundown of the limited number of fonts available on the iPhone. He even includes a nifty table showing what is and isn’t available. Well played, indeed.

The only point I would add is that not only are there a limited number of fonts available on the iPhone, but the fonts that are there appear to be anemic. It appears that a number of glyphs are missing, including #8617, which corresponds to the return arrow which is typically used in footnotes¹.

I made a quick little HTML page that uses Javascript to tear through glyphs 8200 through 8700, which you can use to compare between the iPhone and your computer. You’ll notice only the larger roman numerals are missing, in both uppercase and lowercase forms, which I believe suggests that the missing glyphs were chosen, rather than randomly forgotten.

Ultimately, I don’t know if this is a font issue or an iPhone Safari issue, and I really don’t know how to properly test this to determine what’s going on. It appears all the fonts are missing the same glyphs, which strikes me as odd, and leads me to believe that this is possibly an issue with Safari and not the font files themselves. But what the hell do I know? I am obviously clueless about this. Honestly, I just like poking at the pretend buttons on the screen. I’ll leave the thoughtful analysis to the adults…

1. Both my site and Gruber’s use them.↩