I saw Helvetica, the documentary film, at the Full Frame Documentary Festival in Durham. The festival, in its tenth year, may have gotten too big for its own good. There were too many films for all of them to be shown in the Carolina Theatre, so some pieces, including Helvetica were shown in ballrooms of the adjacent hotel. Unfortunately, sitting in those fixed, armless chairs for so long was an unpleasant experience making it hard to enjoy the film.
As a long time Mac developer including a stint writing printer drivers, I’m probably more conscious of fonts than most people. Maybe that’s why I didn’t find so interesting the plethora of shots showing the pervasiveness of Helvetica in the world, especially signs and advertising. I did appreciate seeing interviews with lots of font designers who showed great passion about their work, including those involved with it from its beginnings in the late 1950s.
The style of the film emulates the style of the font itself. Helvetica the font is known for its neutrality. Some love the neutrality because it lets the content deliver the message alone. Others hate it because the neutrality gives up the opportunity to communicate on another level. The film is little more than a collection of interviews and shots of the font’s usage in the real world with little commentary provided to guide the viewer, which seems fitting to mirror the neutrality of the font.
Tidbit: the designer of the American Airlines logo spoke proudly of his work noting that AA is the only airline not to redesign their logo in the past 40 years and that the logo was the first public usage of what programmers call “camelCase”, — that is, two or more capitalized words joined together without intervening spaces.