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Helvetica vs Zapf Dingbats

We had an office outing to see the movie Helvetica the other day. We all enjoyed it (though I’d be interested to know what non-designers make of it). Naturally I was disappointed there weren’t more magazines featured in it. A few front covers, plus Neville Brody and David Carson and that was about it. Though Brody hasn’t designed magazines for a while now I thought there might have been a bit more from him about how he moved on from the typographic gymnastics of The Face to the austere Helvetica-only launch of Arena. Perhaps if there’s ever a director’s cut it’ll feature there?

Carson repeated the one great story of his RayGun years, demonstrating his belief in the designers’ right to self expression through the infamous Bryan Ferry feature spread. For those that haven’t seen the movie or heard the story before, this was an interview with the Roxy man in issue 21 of RayGun that Carson deemed so dull that he ran the entire text in the abstract Zapf Dingbats font (pictured above and below). Truly a defining moment of that era, it’s a design that seems to turn up in every book about editorial design (it was in my book Issues, in We Love Magazines, and has just appeared again in the recent book Editorial Design by Yolanda Zapaterra).

What everyone misses, though (and I had too until recently), is that the whole text was published in a legible font at the back of the same issue of RayGun, complete with a repeat of the asterix motif (see below). Perhaps Carson and RayGun didn’t quite have the courage of their convictions after all?