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Helvetica: still fresh after 50 years

Posted by Will Emigh on December 14, 2007 at 10:42 PM

Ian and I recently watched Helvetica, a documentary on the eponymous font (if you have Netflix, you can watch it on demand). There are a lot of great interviews with designers talking about the impact of Helvetica, both when it was introduced and now. Despite the fact that they're talking about something inherently boring (a font), the interviews manage to be indredibly interesting. How? They're all overstated and passionate.

There's the "old guard" type designer who evaluates Helvetica in terms of carving letters into metal, the pair of designers who think that Helvetica is poopular because it says everything, and even the woman who talks about how Helvetica was behind the Vietnam War and the Iraq War.

My takeaway from the movie is that anything can be interesting if it's presented well. Most of the designers interviewed say something similar, but it never becomes repetitive. The film itself is also filled with long sequences of just uses of the font in public and music, yet they never become tiresome.

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