Hel-fucking-vetica
Don’t mistake legibility for communication.
David Carson | Helvetica, The Film
Last January 25 , via Google Video people had a chance to watch the documentary, Helvetica – the Film. Only to be taken down after two days because it wasn’t a legal upload. I was lucky enough to get a DVD copy from a friend who just came back from San Francisco. A one hour and 15 minute movie about a font – great, imagine if they made a film about Comic Sans!
Seeing the old pioneers of typography and hearing what they have to say about graphic design was reason enough to watch it – and the film was right, I thought they were all dead. It was a movie of old vs. new. Modern vs. Grunge. The Familiar vs Experimentation. At end of the day, it is not the tools that you have but how your final output will get your message across to your target audience.
Some graphic designers go through a Helvetica obsession phase, some get over it, some don’t. I like Helvetica but I’m not obsessed with it. Variety is the spice of life.
One of the best decisions of they made was change the former name of it - Neue Haas Grotesk. I can’t even pronounce that name without phlegm coming out of my esophagus. Helvetica literally means — the Swiss font.
Paul Scher was amusing in her anecdote, I like the way that she associated certain fonts with memoirs. She didn’t like Helvetica because not conforming felt like being rebellious with her mom. According to her the font was responsible for the wars that have happened in the past years, it was the type face of choice for WWII and the recent wars in Iraq - hilarious and weird but she may actually have a point. On the same note, when I was choosing a type for my logo I choose the font, DIN Light. I originally wanted a serif font but I preferred the look of this:
For a certain period I always used this type in my design studies and I had no idea why. It dawned on me why I love this type so much. It was the font that my brother used in his draft plans when he was still an architecture student. The German brand Steadler had a lettering template for this font. The smooth, straight, black outlines , the clean spaced letters and titles of the finished drafts looked charming to me. Thus, began with my fascination with art instruments. Whenever one of his pens disappeared the culprit would be me. I had no idea that they were that fragile and expensive — hindi pala sila pareho ng Panda ballpen. When I took up Fine Arts in college I inherited what was left of his drawing instruments.
This film also made me realize that I miss designing so much. And I mean soooo much in 72pt Helvetica Bold. When I took on a management role I had to leave the design part. As much as I want to practice it when I get home I’m just too tired and too sleepy to do anything.
Stumbled upon this alternative Helvetica shirt to add in my shopping list:
Not-so-blind item:
One of the design legends pictured above, who has a semi rock star status, reportedly has a 5 figure US$ design talk talent fee. The total cost of bringing him/her in one of our local, and probably, only design conference would amount to quarter of a million pesos.