Saturday, October 16, 2010

Helvetica

Helevtica is a film directed by Gary Hustwit that was released in 2007 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the typeface's introduction. Its basically a history of Helvetica and an insight into how this one particular typeface came to take over large portions of the font world in the 1960's. It explains the backlash against Helvetica and the rifts between 1950's modernists who admired Helvetica's clean lines (these guys all inhabit Sterling Cooper style offices) and the scruffy postmodernists who hate Helvetica for all the same reasons that the modernists love it. This is the kind of film that the late Stanley Kubrick (a font fanatic) would have gone nuts for and I have to admit I really enjoyed for reasons that I don't quite understand - I suppose because it appeals to my inner geek or maybe its just interesting to watch passionate people get all worked up something - anything - in this age of apathy. (This blog post of course was written in Helvetica)