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Helvetica: the little typeface that

leaves a big mark

Landing your first graphic

design job

I'm comic sans, asshole

contentsLetters

i'm comic sans, ashole

landing your first graphic design job

Helvetica: The little typeface that leaves a big mark

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5 The reason I want to be a designer is because I enjoy drawing, and creating images. I enjoy putting things down on paper that is in my head. I love creating images and then modifying them on the com-puter. It’s fun designing thing and coming up with solution through sketches and brain-storming. That’s why I enjoy designing. I started drawing when I was young and I en-joyed it ever since. I can see my self in the future in a office or working at home, designing different projects.

Joshua BaileyBrewton, Alabama

My Journey to becoming an effective designer started at Vaughn Forest Church. I was given the opportunity to be the leader of a technology team of people who produced mate-rial for the student ministry. I was introduced to the adobe suite of applications and over several years of mistakes and trial and error I figured out I really enjoyed what I was do-ing. Forward a few years as I entered Troy university design and innovation made sense as a direction to follow. I want to be a designer be-cause it’s what makes sense to me. I enjoy the level of detailed thought that has to go into

any given design and thinking about solving

a problem by thinking about a

solution from uncon-ventional angles. Math,

science, writing, teach-ing—nothing else quite holds the same appeal for me. There is a dis-tinct lack of passion for

other fields.

Thomas JonesMontgomery, Alabama

I got interested in design after I found many volunteer opportunities working for my local cultural center (non-profit) which needed schedules and brochures made for up-coming events. I have always loved design and art because I have drawn since I was a young child. I recently decided to further my design educa-tion by pursuing my masters in industrial design. In the future I hope to continue my design education and create new and exciting design.

Mairead ShaffieldJacksonville, Florida

I became interested in de-signing when I used to watch home-makeover shows with my mother as a teenager. Interior design takes it knowledge of furniture correlation from ba-sic design. Knowing how things worked together to form a larger image peaked my inter-ests and so I decided to major in graphic design in college. I have since decided to carry my skills in the photography field where design is still key. The image from the camera is designed through the photogra-pher’s eyes just like a poster is designed.

Heather AllemanTroy, Alabama

Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typog-raphy since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.

You don’t like that your co-worker used me on that note about stealing her yogurt from the break room fridge? You don’t like that I’m all over your sister-in-law’s blog? You don’t like that I’m on the sign for that new Thai place? You think I’m pedes-trian and tacky? Guess the fuck what, Picasso. We don’t all have seventy-three weights of stick-up-my-ass Helvetica sitting on our seventeen-inch MacBook Pros. Sorry the entire world can’t all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type. Sorry some people like to have fun. Sorry I’m standing in the way of your minimalist

Bauhaus-esque fascist snooze-fest. Maybe sometime you should take off your black turtleneck, stop compulsively adjusting your Tumblr theme, and lighten the fuck up for once.

People love me. Why? Because I’m fun. I’m the life of the party. I bring levity to any situation. Need to soften the blow of a harsh message about restroom etiquette? SLAM. There I am. Need to spice up the directions to your graduation party? WHAM. There again. Need to convey your fun-loving, approachable nature on your business’ web-site? SMACK. Like daffodils in motherfucking spring.

When people need to kick back, have fun, and party, I will be there, unlike your pathetic fonts. While Gotham is at the science fair, I’m banging the prom queen behind the woodshop. While Avenir is practicing the clarinet, I’m shredding “Reign In Blood”

on my double-necked Strato-caster. While Univers is refilling his allergy prescriptions, I’m racing my tricked-out, nitrous-laden Honda Civic against Tokyo gangsters who’ll kill me if I don’t cross the finish line first. I am a sans serif Superman and my only kryptonite is pretentious buzz-kills like you.

It doesn’t even matter what you think. You know why, jagoff? Cause I’m famous. I am on every major operating system since Mi-crosoft fucking Bob. I’m in your signs. I’m in your browsers. I’m in your instant messengers. I’m not just a font. I am a force of motherfucking nature and I will not rest until every uptight arm-chair typographer cock-hat like you is surrounded by my lovable, comic-book inspired, sans-serif badassery.

Enough of this bullshit. I’m gonna go get hammered with Papyrus.

I’M COMIC SANS, ASSHOLE.BY MIKE LACHER

So, you’re a college graduate … now what? It’s a surreal feeling walking across the stage in your cap and gown, picking up a diploma holder (with no diploma in it … yet) and heading out to face the world. Whether you are a recent college graduate, or just gearing up for graduation, looking for and finding your first job post-college can be an overwhelming task. ‘Where can I find a design job and how do I land it? And

am I really ready for life after college?’ are probably just a couple of the many questions you are asking yourself. Finding your first design job isn’t just an important step in getting your career going – it’s also an explo-ration of the design field and the next step in the learning process. Here’s a tip – the key to finding the right first graphic design job is knowing what you want and what you can offer to your future employer.

Knowing What You Want.

No one can walk into your life and tell you which design path is best for you. While it may be dif-ficult to decide, you have to hon-estly take time to evaluate your wants and needs and decide what you want and need out of your first job. If you know specifically what type of job you want, you will be able to find a job sooner than if you just jump into design

Landing Your First Graphic Design Jobby Guest Blogger (from www.youthedesigner.com)

job listings or create a generic resume. Here are a couple things you should consider when look-ing for jobs.

• Are you looking to expand your skill set? If you are, look for jobs that will allow you to learn the skills you feel like you are weakest in.

• Are you a ‘learn-as-you-go’ entrepreneur type? If so, you could consider starting a free-

lance design business.• What are you passionate about? Find the aspect of design that makes you happiest and start looking in that area.

Once you have an idea of what you want and need in a job, it’s time to find out what jobs are out there. (If you aren’t sure where to look for jobs, this article lists 10 great places to find graphic design jobs.) Start checking job listings anywhere you can find

them. Weed out the jobs that don’t fit your needs and the jobs that you aren’t qualified for. Even if you aren’t qualified for a position take a few minutes to look at the job listing to see what employers are looking for; you might even get ideas for other design-related jobs you hadn’t considered before.

While you are on the job hunt, talk to your college professors and other in the design depart-ment of your university because they usually have leads on jobs or internships within the depart-ment or with local companies. Networking is huge in landing a job. Network, network, network.

Knowing What You Can Offer.

While you are primarily con-cerned with what you can learn and get out of a job, your future employer is mostly concerned about what you can do for him or her. So, now is a good time to evaluate your skills and writing them down.

• What software programs do you know and how well do you know each one? Are you certified with any programs?

• What niche design classes have you taken and how well did you do in them? What skills did

you learn in those classes?• Think about your past jobs. Even though the jobs may not have been in the design field, did you learn anything or develop any skills that will benefit your future career?

After you’ve decided what you want and what you can offer, it’s time to create your resume. Don’t just create one generic resume, take the extra time and create multiple resumes that are tailored to specific design jobs, employers or situations. (Here’s a great article to help you get started on your graphic design resume.)

You’re the designer, so I don’t have to tell you this, but graphic design is a visual medium. You are almost always going to need to have a resume, but you are always going to have to supple-ment that resume with a portfo-lio. It doesn’t matter if you only have ‘student work,’ you can still create a great beginner’s graphic design portfolio. (If you aren’t sure how to design a portfolio, All Graphic Design has a great tutorial to help get you started.) Some jobs may not require a portfolio, but it’s still a good idea to have one ready – just in case. Putting together a portfolio is also a good exercise to help you determine your current strengths

and weaknesses – and know that employers are going to ask you about your strengths and weak-nesses.

Looking for your first job post-college can be a long and frustrating process, but be persistent. Don’t just look at the classified ads in the newspaper. Keep re-evaluating the type of job you want. Work on building up your design portfolio and refine your resume. Network. Network. Network. And, if all the jobs you are looking at require a skill set you don’t have, consider taking a course to expand your skills.

Landing your first job is all about matching your creativity and skills with an organization’s needs. Your first job is also a very valuable learning experi-ence – you will learn about the different ways design is practiced and what skills employers deem most important. Be persistent and you’ll find your first design job, and just know, your next job search (no matter how soon or far away that is) will be much easier.

Question: What do Ameri-can Airlines, American Ap-parel, Comme des Garçons, Evian, Intel, Lufthansa, Nestlé and Toyota have in common?

Answer: They all use the same typeface in their cor-porate identities - Helvetica. You can also spot that font on the flags fluttering from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' trucks, the album sleeve of John Coltrane's "A Love Su-preme," and all of the sig-nage on the New York sub-way system.

It has now been 50 years since Helvetica was intro-duced. Even if you've never heard its name before, you would be bound to recognize the typeface, because you'll have seen it so often without knowing. We live in such a bloated visual culture that a typical Western consumer is said to see - as opposed to actually notice - more than 3,000 corporate messages every day, and many of them are printed in Helvetica.

Helvetica plays such an im-portant part in our lives that the Museum of Modern Art in New York is celebrat-ing its 50th anniversary by

acquiring a set of the origi-nal lead type, making it the first typeface to become part of the museum's collec-tion. MoMA is also opening a "50 Years of Helvetica" exhibition on Friday. And Helvetica is the subject of a feature documentary, which premiered last month at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.

Why make such a fuss about a typeface? In short, be-cause it does its job so well.

"Helvetica delivers a mes-sage quickly and efficiently without imposing itself," said Christian Larsen, cura-tor of the MoMA exhibition. "When reading it, one hard-ly notices the letter forms, only the meaning, it's that well-designed. It's crisp, clean and sharply legible, yet humanized by round, soft strokes. Many type de-signers have said that they can not improve on it."

Like all beautifully designed typefaces, Helvetica is a democratic luxury. Great typefaces - like the com-puter fonts Verdana and Georgia, and the gorgeous 18th-century print lettering of Baskerville and Bodoni - are of the same aesthetic

and technical quality as more conventional luxuries, such as Aston Martin sports cars, An-dreas Gursky's photographs and haute couture Chanel dresses. The difference is that rather than costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, they're free. You can read a typeface for nothing if a publisher has paid a nominal fee to use it in a book or magazine. And you can choose to read - and send - your e-mails in Helvetica, Verdana or Georgia, because those fonts come free with most computer software packages.

Despite its formal bril-liance, Helvetica was not especially success-ful when it was first in-troduced in 1957 un-der its original name, Neue Haas Grotesk. It was conceived by Edouard Hoffmann, director of the Haas Type Foundry in the quiet Swiss town of Münchenstein, as a contemporary version of Akzidenz Grotesk, a late 19th-century sans serif type-face (that's one without deco-rative squiggles at the ends of the letters) that had become popular with Swiss graphic de-signers during the mid-1950s. Hoffmann commissioned a lit-tle-known typography design-er, Max Miedinger, to create the new font. The result was Neue Haas Grotesk, but for several years few people knew about it.

In those days, typefaces were made by carving the shapes of the letters from metal. Anyone wishing to use a particular font

had to buy an entire set of let-ters. This made it so expensive to develop - and to use - new typefaces, that new designs were relatively rare, and many of the most popular fonts were centuries-old, like Baskerville and Bodoni.

Enter the computer. Thanks to technology, typefaces can be designed and distributed so speedily that thousands of new ones are created every year. Their merits and demerits are then debated heatedly on blogs and Web sites. Even we "civil-

ians" - as graphic design geeks call the rest of us - have be-come amateur typography ex-perts by choosing our favorite styles from the Fonts menus on our computers.

But things were very differ-ent in 1961, when the British typography designer Matthew Carter was asked to design a modernized version of Ak-zidenz Grotesk for the signage in a new terminal at Heathrow Airport. Neue Haas Grotesk had been launched four years before, but he had never heard of it. "If we'd known about it,

The little typeface that leaves a big

mark

By Alice Rawsthorn

I'm sure we would have used it, since it's a much better type-face than the one I drew," said Carter, who went on to create Verdana and Georgia. "But the typesetting trade was very con-servative then, and new type designs traveled slowly."

During the same year, Haas's parent company, Mergenthal-er Linotype, decided to market Neue Haas Grotesk interna-tionally and to change its name to one that would be more memorable in English. As the spruce modernist Swiss Style

of graphic design was then very fashionable, they chose Helvetica, as a more accessible and easily pronounce-able version of Helve-tia, the Latin word for Switzerland.

The rebranding worked. Helvetica proved so popular, es-pecially among U.S. advertising agencies, that it became the de-

fault typeface for any 1960s company wishing to project a dynamic, modern image. By the end of the decade, the de-signers Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda had chosen it as the typeface for New York's new subway signs. However, when the cost-conscious Mass Transit Authority discovered that a similar font, Standard Medium, would be cheaper, the early subway signs were printed in that, not Helvetica.

By the late 1980s, Helvetica was ubiquitous. A digital ver-sion of the font, Arial, was introduced in 1990. Arial has

"Helvetica delivers a message quickly

and efficiently without imposing

itself."