So, I finally saw Helvetica this week. Yes, very lame to have waited so long, but I'm always wary of films with such niche appeal, susceptible as they are to The Dancing Bear Effect: It's not so much that the bear dances well, as that it dances at all. So it is with films about obscure, obsessive topics; just about anyone could do a documentary about typography, and they would be guaranteed a small, but reliable and passionate, audience. Typographers and font geeks are a passionate bunch, and if you didn't know this already, Helvetica would rapidly set you straight.

It's a pretty good movie, especially considering the two very different audiences to which it's playing: the aforementioned font geeks, and the general public looking for an entertaining and perhaps educational 80 minutes. The drama that the filmmakers try to build out of the feud between the Modernists and the Post-Modernists is interesting for about four minutes, and then becomes dull and repetitive to the uninitiated. The majority of the film, though, concerns itself with convincing the non-geek that this is meaningful stuff, and it largely succeeds.

To the average person who claims "I don't really care about typography," the average typographer might remark, "Yes, you do. You just don't realize it." Type, like cinematography, product design, web page layouts and interior design, affects everyone that experiences it, frequently without making itself known. In this way creative professionals of many stripes are in the same boat, spending their days and energies creating things that are hidden in plain sight.

Part of the design process is producing documents, in just about every branch of the creative professions--whether they be presentation slide shows, web pages, portfolios or any of a dozen other things--and documents use words. The impression the reader has of the content is refracted through the lens of the type in which it's set, like it or not, and as creative professionals, we're not allowed to ignore that. So we have to do some typography. This is a hugely daunting task. Typographers, after all, spend their entire lives getting good at this stuff, and one theme that pulses through the length of Helvetica is that Good Typography is Hard.

Helvetica, the font, is a way out of this conundrum for plenty of professionals. As one designer interviewed in the film observes, anyone can set some text in Helvetica Medium, put some white space around it, and it will look pretty good. Not great, but not bad. Professional. For engineers and project managers this is enough. They have the luxury of shrugging and saying "Hey, not my job. At least I didn't use Comic Sans." With the advent of the personal computer and the ability to select an unobtrusive font over an obnoxious one, that level of typographical attention has become a global minimum standard. As creative professionals, though, we have to go at least one step further, regardless of specific field.

The good news is, the learning curve is pretty linear. Unlike many skills, a little knowledge of type will make your work a little better, so it's not like you have to take a class to get anywhere (although it certainly wouldn't hurt). Luckily for us, typographers and font geeks are an evangelical bunch, generally keen on spreading the word, either in conversation or through layman-seeking books on the subject. Erik Spiekermann--designer of FF Meta and Officina, and along with Michael Bierut the source of the funnest diatribes in the film--wrote a book in 1993 with the smirk-inducing title Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works (font geeks will recognize the source of the title instantly, the rest of us have to read the back cover). It's aimed at making everyday people better at setting type in their documents, and is loads of fun to read; it's also one of dozens of books with this mission.

A friend bought me Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style, a sort of Strunk and White for the font-curious, for my birthday a few years back. The history bits at the beginning are interesting in an academic sort of way, but only recently, while giving my portfolio a much needed makeover did its true beauty emerge. Like any good primer, it is eminently searchable, and so while trying to pick fonts for my portfolio, I began looking up those that appealed to me to see what Robert had to say about them.

The typeface I finally chose for headers--Futura--is overused. Not nearly as badly as Helvetica, but enough so that Jessica Helfand wrote an article about its overuse in Design Observer last month. Like Helvetica though, Futura still has its place, and it turns out my portfolio is one of them. After reading through its intent and context in Elements, I came to the conclusion that Futura made perfect sense for my work, for reasons I won't list right now because they're boring. Moreover, Robert was so kind as to recommend a family of serif fonts (Bodoni) that work nicely in the text blocks beneath the big, sharp, triumphant Futura capitals above.

The end result looks fantastic, everyone agrees; even my graphic designer friends say so. And it wasn't that hard. More important, there's now a reason and a story behind the letters. The need for deliberate choices is a universal in the creative disciplines, and anyone from an illustrator to an architect can tell you that choosing something for a reason always yields better results than choosing it because you just kind of like it.

Alternately, you can pay someone to do this for you. Hiring a graphic designer to look through your work and make some adjustments or recommendations is not that expensive, and for an important document it's worth it. They will, after all, do a better job than you, unless you're a graphic designer yourself, in which case you got bored with this article 6 paragraphs back. There's much to recommend this option, not least of which is the thrill of having that level of skill and attention trained upon your own work. In the end I avoid doing this as much as I can though, because it deprives me of an excuse to learn about something I find more compelling every time I look at it. I too want to be a font geek some day.