Design that lasts forever

How long does your design last? If you designed, let’s say, the onboarding flow of an app, your design may already be changed after a month or even a week. If you designed a poster, after the campaign is over, your design has expired — unless it ends up in an archive or maybe even a museum. If you designed a building, you’re design will last much longer. Decades, centuries even.

But if you designed a typeface, your design may last even longer than that. Especially when it’s as ubiquitous as Helvetica. To celebrate the fact that the documentary Helvetica is 15 years old, it can be watched online for free this week. So today in the train to and from work I watched it. What makes it such a nice film is that it’s not just about Helvetica, it’s a story about the role and impact of design on our everyday lives.

And few designs have made an impact like the design of Helvetica. If you look for it, you will find it literally almost everywhere. It’s used in everything from logos to signage. It makes me wonder how long Helvetica will last. I imagine that hundreds of years from now, when the buildings, apps and posters designed today have long perished, there will still be letters in Helvetica everywhere.