“Everywhere you look you see typefaces, but there’s probably you see one more than any other one and that’s Helvetica. You know there it is and it just seems to come from nowhere. It seems like air, like gravity.” - a short phase from the movie.
Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture that was produced and directed by Gary Hustwit.
The creation of the font face was a history. It was developed by Max Miedinger with Edüard Hoffmann in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland.
To be honest, I find the movie boring to watch yet very informative in the sense of graphic designs (to those who are typographic designers of course). Helvetica usually appears in corporate logos, signage for transportation systems, fine art prints, and myriad other uses worldwide. It’s like a trend, its everywhere. We are surrounded with millions of words everyday and yet, we even don’t care about what font that was being used and typically not the history about it. After I watched the movie, I try to look for words that was posted or even written everywhere just to justify what is being presented in the movie. I realized and had observed that most of the words we noticed and read everyday were written in Helvetica. Its clarity and readability will make the readers more eager to read more about what was posted.
Now, there are a lot of new existing fonts that was being used by a lot of people. You know, people were experimenting in the sense of trying to discover new things (new fonts =) ). Still, I think Helvetica has the crown of the oldest yet expensive font ever created. Cheers to the makers of the film and hooray for HEL-VE-TI-CA. =)
