Helvetica

Weather you use the font or not, love the font or hate it, you will learn to appreciate modern typography more by watching "Helvetica". I thoroughly enjoyed the documentary and shared it with my graphic design students, many of whom bought their own copies. Typographic liberties taken in the film do not lessen the impact of a funny, quirky, fast paced look at the major tool of graphic designers-type. Great way to introduce students to contemporary designers and their thoughts about typography. Can't wait for Objectified!!!

The historical significance of the typeface as well as the on-going evolution of typography make this a must see for anyone interested in typography and graphic design, but also a fine entertainment for film enthusiasts. Compelling interviews with notable professionals are informative, witty and often hilarious. Visuals run the gamut from elegance to true grit. Kudos to Gary Hustwit and his crew for this living history before it is not longer possible.

Saw some clips form this on YouTube and decided to buy it - if you are into graphic design and marketing, this is fascinating. The authors do a very good job with the documentary style. In addition to the main program (about 90 minutes), there are supplemental outtakes with the designers who were interviewed (bonus material.) Add this DVD to your collection of you want a sold reference on how type design affects us every day - in everything we see.

This is a terrible documentary. It is a story without a plot, and many, many "examples" of Helvetica shown are, in fact, other san serif typsefaces! The film editor obviously isn't sensitive enough to typeface design to recognize the difference between Helvetica and other san serif designs (for example, Bloomingdales dept store!). A bad disappointment, one of the most wasteful DVDs I've ever seen!

I have a high tolerance for slow documentaries, but this one was pretty dull. There were some interesting bits; talking heads that got really passionate about art and design, stories about the old days of typesetting, etc. But too much of the film was pretentious filler.

What can you really say about this movie? If you are a fan of design, this should have a designated spot in your library. Typographic design is something that goes completely unnoticed to most people, even though it is used in our lives day in and day out. Helvetica chronicles the birth of the most well known typeface to date, and yet most people have never heard of it, but know it's more recent kin - Arial. What I love most about the film is how you quickly gain the realization that the world we know is littered with this simple yet complex typeface, and how it's creation changed the look of modern advertising and branding forever.

Even as their ideas and decisions form a big part of the visual fabric of our lives, most consumers probably don't know too much about graphic designers and the way they go about doing what they do. "Helvetica", while on the surface a documentary about the development and world domination of a particular style of lettering, was more enjoyable to me for it's glimpses into the working lives of graphic designers, some of them towering personalities in that field. Tracing the development of Helvetica from it's origins at a Swiss design firm through to it's almost universal acceptance as a typeface of choice, the film includes snippets of interviews with everyone from the most seasoned European designers who have slaved over things like typeface for 50 years to the artists at the forefront of the aptly named "grunge" design movement that was ubiquitous in magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone throughout the 1990's. The interviewees level platitudes and criticisms about aspects of style in general and typefaces in particular with ease and evident relish. A designer by the name of Beirut has a great "scenery chewing turn" where he literally lays verbal waste to the stodgy, dusty, crappy way American businesses visually marketed themselves pre-1950. Another designer lets loose a semi-bizarre rant in which she makes a connection between her distaste for the over-usage of Helvetica and the fact that she associates it with Vietnam, Republicans, People Who Voted for Reagan, Big Impersonal Corporations, and the War in Iraq. Agree with their opinions or not, I have to admit that it was great fun to see these intellectuals get their stylish spectacles all fogged up over Helvetica, which plays such a very large role in their small slice of the modern world. As an added bonus, we get to learn what "san serif" means, which is worth the price of admission.

Back in 1979, my boss asked me to write the copy and design the layout of the literature for our new product (an audio analyzer). I knew nothing about fonts, * but when I saw Helvetica at the print shop, it was love at first sight. Not only was it one of the most-beautiful "things" I'd ever seen, but it was visually neutral, not conveying any particular emotion or atmosphere. I continue to use Helvetica for my (unpublished) fiction, because it lets the writing speak for itself, without implicit "editorializing". Helvetica's beauty and neutrality have made it the world's most-popular font for decades. This is a film about the changes in typography since the introduction of Helvetica in 1960 -- its near-universal adoption, then the natural reaction against it. If you are at all interested in typography or design, you'll almost certainly enjoy this film. If it has a problem, it's that it doesn't accommodate the general viewer with much information about the history of type design. It assumes you already know something about the subject matter. The Blu-ray is a bit on the soft side (compared to what one expects from Blu-ray disks), probably because the film was (likely) shot on 16mm. It is, however, completely free (as I far as I could tell) from dust, scratches, and spots. * It's worth noting that the terms "font" and "typeface" have the wrong meanings. "Officially", a typeface is a style (Times Roman, Courier, Bookman, Avant Garde), while a font is the particular treatment of a style -- size, weight, etc. This is, of course, backwards. "Font" is obviously derived from "fount" (source), and thus //should// refer to the style, while "typeface" suggests what one would see when looking at the face of the type -- the type slug itself. The people in this film commonly refer to type styles as "fonts" -- which is logically correct, even though it's "officially" wrong.