Helvetica Documentry Review

I've always wanted to know more about fonts but I never took the time to really figure anything out about them until tonight. My goal was to pick a show that was not super exciting so I could do some homework on my laptop, but instead I ended up turning the laptop off and watching the documentary intently. It's on the Netflix instant queue and the director is Gary Hustwit.

You can really modify a message by changing the font, which I'm very happy to learn. I already knew how great it was to use colors, but did not have any font knowledge in my tool set on how fonts can be used to add character and expression to words.

Here is the gist of what I learned:

• Helvetica is a classic swiss made type which the later Arial type has much in common with.
• Like music, its the space between the notes that makes the music great, space between the letters makes the type great. My recent experiments with music tell me that paying attention to the spaces/quiet is as valuable as filling it up with noise.
  
• Coming out in the 50's and 60's and used heavily by corporations it was the default for a long time and people are used to seeing it everywhere.
• The 70's and 80's had a lot of experimental types to counteract the Helvetica and I guess that was the balancing Yin/Yang effect to come to more of a balanced use of different types.
• You probably can't go wrong if you use Helvetica except it does come across as boring to people who pay attention to type choice.
• I really liked the guy who had some super boring article about a singer and since the content was not good, he chose a font that was undecipherable. It had not occurred to me that this also is a choice and I already want to play around with that notion.
  

I also found a nice explanation of Arial vs Helvetica
http://ilovetypography.com/2007/10/06/arial-versus-helvetica

I'm going to experiment with blogs using different fonts to get better at understanding how and when to use them (too bad I get so few choices in the editor here). I'd also like to make my own font someday just for fun.