By Mark Healy Design by Lucy Quintanilla
Gary Hustwit wanted to watch movies about design—fonts, urban planning, the heroes of graphic design—so he went out and started making them. It’s really that simple. Helvetica. Urbanized. Objectify. (The first film shot inside Apple’s Idea Lab.) And two new ones—Design Canada, which he produced, and Rams, which explores the career and contributions of industrial designer Dieter Rams. Here, the director/producer talks about his punk DIY training, the value of independence, and why he thought the world needed a movie about a font.
Age: 54 Point of Origin: Orange County, California
If I were to try to pitch a group of investors on an 80-minute film about a font I’d be laughed out of the building.
Just me. I was the only audience for that film as far as I knew. It was that simple. I wanted to see a movie about these designers and their processes and to learn about them. And in 2005, when I started working on it, there was nothing available.
No. I had just always been a design geek and into fonts. I got a Macintosh in the late ‘80s and used it to design my friend’s band’s record. In college, my friends were in bands and when I got kicked out of college, I worked with them, releasing records and booking tours. I ended up working at this legendary punk rock label SST—Black Flag, Hüsker Dü and all these amazing bands. To me, punk rock is just making things happen that you want to see happen and not letting anyone tell you you can’t. It was just this idea that if there’s something you want to see that doesn’t exist, you just do it.
Objectified (2009) Hustwit’s second feature documentary explores our relationship to the inanimate objects we rely on and interact with in our everyday lives. He interviewed dozens of design legends including Dieter Rams, Chris Bangle, Karim Rashid, Jonathan Ives, and others. Hustwit interviewed Ives at the Apple Design Lab, the first time anyone was permitted to film there.
SST Records An independent record company formed in Long Beach, California in 1978 by Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn. It grew to become a seminal hard core label and released records by Hüsker Dü, the Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Soundgarden and others.
Flyers courtesy of SST Records
To me, punk rock is just making things happen that you want to see happen and not letting anyone tell you you can’t.
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (2002) What started as a straightforward 3-week document of the band’s recording of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, became an epic, wrenching 18-month shoot when the band was dropped by their label. Hustwig helped finance the expanded shoot and was executive producer. The result is a classic of the music doc genre.
I wanted to make a film about graphic design and typography because I followed these designers. These are the legends of graphic design, people like Massimo Vignelli, people who’d been working for 50 years and had a huge influence on our lives. Vignelli did the subway graphics and the American Airlines logo and all these things we take for granted, and yet there was nothing out there. Nobody had ever asked him to be in a documentary before and that just seemed insane to me. So Helvetica was a structure where I could do that. There’d been a revival of Helvetica in the late ‘90s and there was a lot of debate about it in the design world: Some people liked its simplicity and cleanliness, some people thought it was sterile. And through that conflict, we could tell the story of typography and graphic design and how it affects people’s daily lives. Massimo Vignelli was the first person I emailed and he wrote me write back, saying, ‘Of course he’d like to be interviewed about Helvetica, the most beautiful typeface….†And then I just built on that until I had 15 of the world’s best designers.
Helvetica (2007) The first of Hustwit’s design documentaries has been screened all over the world and seen by a many millions of people. “It was the second documentary Netflix included when they started their streaming service,†he says. And it is still regularly screened around the world, from Tehran to Toronto.
I just started seeing it everywhere, and I was like, 'That’s the glue to the movie.' I announced the film about six months before it would be completed and we sold $75,000 worth of t-shirts and posters, so that helped. And it helped market it. I never sent out a press release about Helvetica. I just put the website up and word spread. Again, there was a pent up demand, an untapped audience for that film. And they just took it in. People were lining up in the streets to see the font movie.
They might for like comic sans or something like that. There has to be some tension around it. Helvetica was the second documentary when Netflix launched their streaming service. It was on Netflix for many, many years. Steady sales continue every month. People still buy it on DVD, they rent the streaming copy on Amazon, they watch it on Kanopy. If you control the rights to the projects you do you can use these new platforms and technologies as they emerge. That’s part of it. I don’t license the films to big distributors who take all rights in perpetuity and just cross my fingers and hope that they do a good job. I’m still making thousands of dollars each month because it’s out there. I don’t know what will happen next month, but it’ll be something, because it’s part of that design world and the documentary world.
You cannot understand good design, if you do not understand people.Dieter Rams, From Rams
You cannot understand good design, if you do not understand people.
I couldn’t believe no one had done a film about him, which was mainly because he didn’t want anyone to do a film about him. And I knew that if I didn’t do a film about him, then no one would. I interviewed him in Objectified. I’d spent an afternoon with him ten years ago. Dieter is in it and so is Johnny Ives. It was the first time they let anybody film inside the Apple Design Lab, which was a big deal.
Rams (2019) A deep appreciation of the consumer product genius, whose work for Braun stands as a paradigm of good design and a great inspiration for Apple and other consumer designers around the world.
Among the many smart, admirable, just plain useful products Dieter Rams and his Braun design team created are kitchen appliances and consumer electronics, including what many consider to be the precursor to Apple's iPod.
Click here to watch Rams
It’s about identity and this new country finding its voice, but it’s also about these exiles from Europe after WWII and these designers giving Canada’s identity this modernist spin. The maple leaf flag was an open design competition. That process alone was fascinating. It’s another one of these untold stories.
Design Canada (2019) This documentary, directed by Greg Durrell and produced by Hustwit, tells the untold story of a country’s visual transformation through graphic design and how European modernism spread to North America after WWII, sparking a golden age of graphic design.
There’s generally this personality trait they share of being unsatisfied with the status quo and always questioning why something is like it is and wouldn’t it better if we just tweaked this little thing. It’s a trait I’ve seen in every designer I’ve interviewed—constantly looking at the world and observing and thinking about why things aren't working as well as they should and thinking of a solution. That constant dissatisfaction with how things are and maybe this idealism of wanting to improve things, wanting to make the world better, or wanting to make the experience better or people’s lives better. I think that’s at the heart of it and it expresses itself in different ways but almost every designer I’ve talked to is a little bit like that. There’s this thing where if the window is open in a restaurant and you’re cold, half the people will ask, ‘Can I close the window?’ The other half will just get up and close the fucking window. And I’m in that second camp. And a lot of designers are, too. Maybe it’s vanity. At least they recognize the constant need for things to change and improve, whether it’s a car door or a building or a city or a font. Trying to improve people’s experice.
Urbanized (2011) What Objectified was for product design, this film is for urban planning. Hustwit started considering how much of city-dwellers’ lives are determined by decisions made by urban planners. “Your life, everything you do is programmed by urban design. You’re operating within a designed environment.†This explores how the environments were planned and the people who planned them.
