The title of this blog is inspired by a quotation by the graphic designer Wim Crowel, in the documentary Helvetica (2007)

The meaning is the content of the text, and not the typeface. And that is why we loved Helvetica very much.

The film then goes on to question this essentially modernist view of the role of design – more broadly, that form is ever transparent to function. Since modernism’s high-water mark in the mid-fifties, the notion that style might somehow be neutral or be abstracted from expression has been under sustained assault, aesthetically and intellectually. Designers have sought to expose or liberate artistic forms from their perceived ‘neutrality’ with regard to their subject; post-modernist criticism declares such a separation of form and content to be impossible.

And yet the idea keeps floating back. Its most recent formulation is found in the notion of ‘information shape’ – the idea that information contains certain intrinsic properties, and that the duty of the designer is to allow these properties to be perceived with clarity, whether on the page or on the web. And while the intellectual grounding of such a notion may be problematic on a philosophical or metaphysical level, three points are unquestionable.

• it is possible for users to experience a more or less easy, more or less successful, more or less satisfactory path in their discovery and interpretation of the information they need.
• it is possible for design to help or hinder each of these aspects of information awareness; and it is the duty of design to optimize them.
• given that any document must have some design – it must be structured and presented in some way – the procedure for optimizing these aspects will have as a precondition the notion of document ’shape’

The hard-core postmodernist will quibble that the definition of information assumed here presupposes the answer; but this is not necessarily the case.

It is possible to argue that instead of attempting to convey documents neutrally, that design should be expressive: to argue, say, as David Carson does, that to represent the word ‘caffeine’ in a crazed, hi-energy typeface captures certain aspects of the experience implied by the word. Which is to say, it captures all the most obvious, superficial aspects that the reader was already aware of – while concealing, say, its scientific properties. Its industrial uses. Its potentially, under some circumstances, sedative effects.

Any form of presentation might limit and distort what is presented. But with certain kinds of information you can see further – and wider – when that presentation is unobtrusive. When it’s as close as possible to neutral to content.

So the purpose of The Helveticist blog is, in the long run, to explore the means of achieving maximum clarity – and hence, maximum expressiveness – in website design. It’ll be a place for philosophical wool-gathering, meandering speculation, and design experimentation. Starting – to move from the apparently abstruse to the apparently banal – with a consideration of the book Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience, by James Kalbach (O’Reilly 2007).