So I finally got around to watching ‘Helvetica.’ This is a documentary about a font. I have written about it before. And I must say, it is the best font-related movie I have ever seen.
Now you might not think that that is much of an endorsement. But it is a gripping 90 odd minutes. I thought I appreciated fonts before but this movie brings typography to a whole new light. Put simply, I simply can no longer look at Arial given the comparative beauty of Helvetica. Indeed, I would have written this blog post in Helvetica except it wasn’t a font option. Tragic. But Helvetica is the font of the Parentonomics website as well as the CITE reports. For marketing documents, accept no substitute. And if you think I’m crazy, watch the movie and see what happens to you.
Donald Knuth is the programmers hero. His “Art of Computer Programming” is the classic text. His invention of “Literate Programming” “Concrete Mathematics” are other monumental achievements. But perhaps his most lasting legacy will be his work on fonts. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/dt.html
His work in this area came about becayse he was unsatisfied with the type setting for a book he wanted to publish and so he created Tex a language for describing fonts. Truly an amazing man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth
LikeLike
I note that Amazon state the DVD is only viewable in Region 1. I presume it would also be computer viewable here?
LikeLike
I can’t imagine it’d be worse than watching F*CK – the documentary. From what I understood of that, the creators were trying to tell people that dropping the f-bomb was no big deal… so they made a big deal of it by making it into a movie.
Anyway, the real question is. How many font-related movies have you seen and how many are there ?!
I’ll slot this movie into my ‘to watch’ list.
LikeLike
Have you played the Arial vs. Helvetica games?
You can find a link to them from this Helvetica site, near the bottom.
http://www.squidoo.com/helvetica_movie
LikeLike