Lovetica
Last night, with only one monitor and really uninterested in doing anything interesting, I decided to watch Helvetica from the Netflix website. I’ve been wanting to watch the documentary since I first heard about it in the middle of last year, but I haven’t gotten around to it. Blasphemous, I know, especially when I’m not only a designer, but a typoholic. I love, love, love typography. My tastes usually remain the same: simple, clean, readable (after all, who are we talking about here?)… and Helvetica is one of those fonts that you just see everywhere. From Crate & Barrel to road signs, from websites to magazines, Helvetica is truly the most grand typeface around.
Made known to me in the movie, and something I found rather interesting, was that the original name for Helvetica was Akzidenz-Grotesque. It was later reformed, cleaned up, and dubbed none other than Helvetica.
Fonts, as a number of people in the documentary agreed, aren’t so much about the positive space as they are about the negative space. It’s what’s in between the letters that makes a font so great. Helvetica is a font where the white space holds everything together so perfectly, like glue. Just, see for yourself.
Thanks, Max Miedinger, for creating such a beautiful, readable, clean, solid, elegant, and usable font.
See this documentary!
Beautiful when bold…
Elegant when thin