Here goes my first attempt at a post on this new-fangled “weblo” thing.
Last week I finally got around to watching “Helvetica”, which as the name suggests is a documentary on the typeface that can be found everywhere from corporate logos to emergency exits to corporate logos to the photo credits in certain editions of HowToGAMIT to corporate logos. Besides branding the viewer as a design dork the picture does a good job of staying engaging all the way through and not letting itself drag on too long in any individual phase (or in its entirety, clocking in at a svelte 80 minutes). The structure is basically interviews with typographers and designers intercut with shots of Helvetica on the street showing its ubiquity. For me it was great to see people like Hermann Zapf (who designed my favourite book-text serif font, Palatino) and Stefan Sagmeister get the opportunity to be on the star side of the lens, and I enjoyed seeing both the pithy things everyone had to say about Helvetica and imagining what the entire interviews must have been like before they selected the bits to actually grant screen time. I think it would have been a fun picture to make on a kind of pleasingly dry topic.
I have to say that despite using Helvetica since I first learned how to do desktop publishing, I hadn’t really thought much about where it came from and what my opinions were towards its prominence — to me it’s a utilitarian typeface that’s by no means my preferred sans serif for its own shapeliness (that would be Futura) that serves admirably for getting the point across, which is where I agree with the modernists, but at the same time I disagree with them that the relationship of typefaces to text should be akin to that of grain neutral spirit to gin — there are plenty of instances where the mood of a design is (and should be) conveyed by the form of the type as well as the content. And I certainly have little but contempt for the postmodernist dicks who think they’re doing something bold and edgy by laying out an entire document in Zapf Dingbats just because they personally didn’t like the content of the piece. So it was a lot of fun for me to toss these arguments back and forth over the course of the picture, giving form to my opinions that had never found the need to be molded into an expressible shape before.
Here’s the IMDB URL, more for my own interest in whether this is all you have to do to include a link in this wordpress thing than the belief that I’m saving anyone any time by not making them type ‘Helvetica’ into the IMDB search field:
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0847817/
If you have a free hour and twenty minutes to kill, you could do worse than check this out — I think it has something to appeal to most people here, whether for love of design, love of international signage, or love of German people getting excited about their relationship with rules.
Update: Aha! There is more to making the links work than just pasting them in.
2nd update: Now I’ve gone crazy with the links. It’s unleashed a monster. I’m smoothage!! I’m smoothage!!! However I do want to draw your attention to one sentence from Hermann Zapf’s Wikipedia page: “Unfortunately, just before the project was completed, Siegel wrote a letter to Zapf, saying that his girlfriend had left him, and that he had lost all interest in anything.”