AlphaDesigner Blogue

I rarely see good films about graphic design, so I guess I’m obliged to write about this one. It’s called Helvetica (official site: www.helveticafilm.com), which is not a very imaginative title. Fancy terms aside, Helvetica is the set of letters that are literary omnipotent, present in street signs and labels, corporate logos and computers. One of the most popular computer fonts, Arial, is similar to Helvetica just like a pirated mp3 to an audio track of a legally bought CD from a major label.

The subject of the movie is specific enough to allow a gang of obsessed brain damaged and equally famous graphic designers to make the speech of their lives and actually be heard by someone outside the industry. Imagine landing on Mars and starting a dispute with your astronauts about the pros and cons of Macs and PCs. The aliens around you will certainly come to the conclusion that all earthlings must be literary insane. Well, watching this film having no clue about graphic design may make you feel like an alien. But it will also answer many questions if you are naturally curious about why the hell you live in a world that gets more and more uniformed and bleak. And here is the treasure chest. Knowledge means power.

Of course it all started with Modernism, which is awesome. In the beginning of the 20th Century some people decided the world was moving too slow, clogged with traditions and rules that were so rotten and overused that the only way to get rid of them was total extermination and search for something completely fresh. However one cannot go against evolution, even with a vibrating supersonic turbo brush in his hand, so Modernism actually came to the inevitable point where all fresh new things make the desperate jump from spontaneity to the serious complexity of an enlightened philosophical movement. Hence it created its own rules and got its own set of anathemas against those who didn’t want to fit in. Purpose – defeated.

Before it completely ran out of spontaneity, Modernism created Helvetica. It was that crisp, legible, readable, reliable, clean typeface that was supposed to declare the end of typography as we know it. Immediately after its creation it completely flooded our environment. In many respects the change reflected the requirements of the modern way of life, the rise of the short attention-span phenomenon and the need to send clear, straight forwarded messages with as less keystrokes as possible. For the designer moguls of this period, everything that couldn’t align well to a grid was a visual virus that had to be tamed or wiped out. You can hear Massimo Vignelli, the founder of Unimark International praising the simplicity of the American Airlines identity with the same excitement a terrorist would use speaking about the supreme meaning of death. If you are a person who likes diversity, it will make you feel sad, at least.

The question that needs to be answered here is why and how such talented people came to the conclusion that time had to stop and the world had to be confined in a perfect geometric shape. The answer is specific for every one of us but the bitter after-taste of the question will hunt you until the end of the film, even after significantly more brighter souls like Paula Scher, Stefan Sagmeister and David Carson come to your rescue. And it was Carson’s words that really cut the cord around my neck:

Don’t confuse legibility with communication. Just because something’s legible, doesn’t mean it communicates. And more importantly it doesn’t mean it communicates the right thing.

Amen!

I’m continuing the Theogony series with another addition – this time I worked on a portrait made by Vincent Keith, one of the best male nude photographers I’ve ever got the chance to know. See more of his work by visiting his photo stream in Flickr or go directly to the set, from which the original portrait was taken.

It’s very interesting how in almost all the polytheistic religions there is always a god that is considered to be primus inter pares. He (or she, in the early systems) is never omnipotent as for instance Jehovah is in Judaism, however he always plays a central role. I’m not aware if such a figure can be considered a predecessor of the single, personal God but it makes sense at least to suspect a connection. And because there is never something really new under the Sun, one can continue to speculate whether this urge to concentrate power isn’t just an aspect of the human psyche which transcends political or religious institutions and is probably rooted in our long forgotten animalistic past. In many respects Zeus is the alpha male of Ancient Greece. He had the right to be bossy, to set the world on fire and most importantly – he was a remarkable sex machine, seducing girls, boys, animals and – when he had the time – other gods. No wonder his wife was in a chronic state of neurosis.

There are a lot of archetypes intertwined in this figure, from the primitive trickster that dares to challenge every rule possible, to the protective deity in the developed agricultural societies or the wrathful male god of the hunting tribes. One interesting fact is he’s the only deity in Ancient Greece whose name has a proven connection with earlier Proto-Indo-European cultures, where the patriarch carries the name Dyēus.

So, with all these facts in mind, depicting Zeus was some sort of a challenge. I tried to hint every archetype although the metaphors aren’t visually equal and some are more abstract than others. My favourite one is his foot, pressing on the Earth. However, the fact that his heel is exactly over Greece was a coincidence. Nevertheless, it was a suitable one. The worshippers represent the inevitable switch to monotheism, when the father figure became omnipotent and impossible to satisfy. And finally – the harness is what should make this image less serious than it has to be, hinting at the idea that even Gods have a weak, submissive side.

What if you’re the God of Water and want to pose for an unconventional portrait? That’s the question!

This is another collaboration, this time with the Italian photographer GianOrso and I use pretty much the same approach as in the Atlas project. However, it’s the setting that goes against the cliché, not the looks of the model. Taken separately, he’s a Classic Neptune – over 30, bearded, somewhat hairy and with a beer belly (there’s the water!). I know, it’s so not Greek and not so Roman. But I find the Greek depictions of Neptune ridiculous – the combination of the head of a grown man and the body of a young athlete is pretty close to being offensive to human nature.