01. LOVED THIS. It hit all the right geek buttons and made me squee a lot.
02. The director was at our screening, which was cool. Prior to the film starting he was like “What are all of you doing inside this dark theatre on such a beautifully afternoon, watching a movie about fonts?” Then he thought better of it and said “… but I just spent two years making a movie about fonts, so I shouldn’t talk.” Heh.
03. It’s funny because they spend a lot of time talking about how ubiquitous Helvetica is in our visual world and yet it’s only when they point out that ubiquity that you really take notice. Lex and I couldn’t not see it everywhere after we left the theatre, it was starting to drive us a bit mad.
04. It’s just so great listening to designers talk about something that really gets their motors running. There is so much enthusiasm and unabashed love for what they do and everything they expressed made me think “YES, I FEEL THE SAME WAY!!!” They all had a fabulous way of phrasing their thoughts to talk about what it is they do and how it affects other people and gah, it was so great.
05. Obviously they made a point of trying to present both points of view on whether or not the widespread use of Helvetica is a good or bad thing. They talked to a bunch of these classic modernist designers who were designing in the fifties and sixties and they were swooning all over themselves with love for the font. Then they talked to younger whippersnappers who hadn’t come of age with a formal design education and broke free of the confines of Helvetica simply by virtue of not knowing what the hell they were doing. There was this one hysterical German dude who was very colourful in expressing his distaste for Helvetica; when asked why he thought it was so ubiquitous in day to day life, he was like “I don’t know, why is bad taste ubiquitous?” ZING! Oh man.
06. There were lots of montages of different uses of Helvetica on billboards and other signage around Europe, as well as other examples from popular culture. We got kind of excited when they showed the little sign from “The Office” followed by the cover of The Beatles’ White Album. WE ARE SO LAME.
07. There was this one point that I thought was really well said that I think is important to repeat. One of the continuous questions was why Helvetica is such a versatile, perfect font; every designer they talked to said that if faced with the charge of improving it in some way, they couldn’t do it. One of the designers mentioned that type design is not about the black — i.e. the printed portion of the letter — but about the white, i.e. the space around the letters. This is equally true of most other fonts, I suppose, but from their perspective it was even more true of Helvetica because the letters are held in check and in balance in such a perfect, tight, and strong way that it’s an immovable force to be reckoned with. Which is a very long way of saying: WHITESPACE IS IMPORTANT, JACKASSES.