Thursday, April 26, 2007

Helvetica, the documentary.


I saw "Helvetica" the documentary today.
It was great. It was made for graphic designers.
The movie explores all aspects of Helvetica, the ones who love it and the ones who hate it.
Do you love or hate Helvetica? Let Veer know. The "love/hate" graphic above is from Veer.
I'd classify myself in the LOVE helvetica camp.
To me it is one of the most perfect typefaces.
I fell in love with the "a" during my art school days.
My typography teacher had us do graphite renderings
of fonts on vellum to learn the beauty of working with type. Do art schools still do this?
Helvetica was one of my favorite ones to imitate. It was so satisfying to me to do a perfect graphite rendition.
I love a lot of fonts...but I kind of feel like Helvetica was one of my first true loves. Now I am going to try to think of something to write for Veer's "love/hate". Hmmm?

3 comments:

patrice said...

Was that Hanft that you were refering to? He was the lettering teacher I had at Art Center in '84. My cousin who went there before me had a cat named Caslon, who had a litter. There was little Bodoni, Helvetica, Gil Sans, just to name a few.
I LOVE type too.
P-

Project Pink Suitcase said...

Hi Patrice!
I'm drawing a blank on names.
If I remember his name I'll post it. I just remember how into type my teacher was. It was like a whole new way to look at fonts.
We were reminded to look at the white space, which is still always good to remember. We used those mechanical graphite pencils with the cool special sharpeners. We had metal eraser guards. The class had it's own special set of tools. I think the year I had it was '88 or '89, so about 3-4 years later than you took the class.
I love that your cousin named her cat after different fonts. So clever and appropriate for a designer. Very cool!!!

Blaize said...

Happy 50th Birthday of Helvetica!