September 18: Helvetica

Published on September 03, 2009 by IAM Screening Series

Helvetica (2007)
September 18, 2009 at 7:00pm
Space 38|39 (38 W. 39th Street, 3rd Floor)
Trailer
 
"Gary Hustwit’s film builds an impressive sense of drama around the rise of the Swiss-designed typeface."
- Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out
 
"It sharpens your eye in general and makes connections between form and content, and between art and life. By rounding up a great group of eloquent obsessives eager to explain their feelings about a font, Hustwit has come up with 80 unexpectedly blissful minutes."
- Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
 
"Even viewers who've never given a serif a second thought, though, are in for an exclamation point of joy from such a well-designed doc."
- Lisa Schwartzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
 
"You’re guaranteed to spend the next few days scanning the world for Helvetica like a child on a cross-country car trip playing I Spy."
- Matt Zoller Seitz, The New York Times
 
Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type. Encompassing the worlds of design, advertising, psychology, and communication, Helvetica invites us to take a second look at the thousands of words we see every day.
 
The film premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival and was nominated for a 2008 Independent Spirit Award in the "Truer Than Fiction" category, and was shortlisted for the Design Museum London's "Designs of the Year" Award. An excerpt of the film was included in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
 
80 Minutes
 
About the Typeface
 
Helvetica was developed by Max Miedinger with Edüard Hoffmann in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland. In the late 1950s, the European design world saw a revival of older sans-serif typefaces such as the German face Akzidenz Grotesk. Haas's director Hoffmann commissioned Miedinger, a former employee and freelance designer, to draw an updated sans-serif typeface to add to their line. The result was called Neue Haas Grotesk, but its name was later changed to Helvetica, derived from Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland, when Haas's German parent companies Stempel and Linotype began marketing the font internationally in 1961.
 
Introduced amidst a wave of popularity of Swiss design, and fueled by advertising agencies selling this new design style to their clients, Helvetica quickly appeared in corporate logos, signage for transportation systems, fine art prints, and myriad other uses worldwide. Inclusion of the font in home computer systems such as the Apple Macintosh in 1984 only further cemented its ubiquity.