Helvetica, Top of the Fonts.
For me, one of the fascinating joys of travel is seeing what’s interesting to different peoples about culture. Generally, and stupidly, I don’t think of Western Europen media at a great divide from the US, but then I pick up the International Herald Tribune and there’s an article celebrating the 50th anniversary of a typeface for goodness sake (The IHT is owned, of course, by the New York Times, where I could rarely imagine such frivolous writing). Helvetica is at once the most famous font of the modern age, and one of the most dismissed, ignored, and revilled. It’s so common that though I think of myself as a middlebrow type hobbiest, I had no idea it was introduced as late as the 50s, which would mean when I first worked with it professionally it was less than 20 years old.
Read the article, see the movie, use the type.
(Thanks to Richard Rutter for the great photograph of the great Helvetica documentary poster.)
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On April 7th, 2007 at 12:00 am
Wow.
When it comes to fonts, I’m a geek. Guess it came from my days in the comics industry… word balloons and such.
Currently, I’m teaching myself to turn my handwritten letters into fonts themselves ala photoshop and imageready.
thanks for passing along this info Fred!
-JX!