Maidgethma Wonderfully offbeat film!

Sharkflei Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

Siflutter It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Ersbel Oraph The maker wanted to so something new, something different. And it is so nice that the employer allowed this experiment. And that is about it.Maybe if the whole thing would have been 20-35 minutes long it would have been wonderful. But there is way too much space filler. So either that is bad planning by shooting too little or somebody was too attached to the footage that nothing could be dumped.Amusingly the story has no apparent structure, yet there is a clear and conventional ending. And the interviews seem to be thrown in as some of the speakers are against Helvetica usage, while most are in favor, but the selection criteria is not obvious to me.One argument this is plain bad work: there is a lot of talk of design, yet there are lots of pictures sliding in with logos written in Helvetica. This all looks like a silly advert from the 1980s. The purpose seems to be something along the lines of "you have to be initiated in order to see it".Still, I had a good laugh with the German designer calling the Swiss militarists (german joke, I know) and telling with a straight face how he is always late, one year late, but to the second.Bottom line: if you are curious about Helvetica and have two hours to waste, knock yourself out. Otherwise, this is a total waste of time.Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch

gavin6942 A documentary about typography (including but not limited to the Helvetica font), graphic design, and global visual culture.So, you might wonder how 90 minutes about a font could be interesting. That must be among the most boring things in the world, right? Not at all. We learn about the whole story of modern typography, and how hard it used to be to design a single letter.We learn that there is a political message to letter shape choices -- to one woman, Helvetica is the font associated with the Vietnam war (and also Iraq). We get a certain feeling from different shapes, and this is one of them.One man asks, is there a science of aesthetics that explains why this font is the perfect one? Why no one has been able to improve on it in 50 years? I find that an interesting question. No math went into designing it, but somehow it has an intrinsic style that seems to be the way we now view language.

David Bogosian A documentary about a typeface? For those of us who take interest in such things, of course! But if you're one of those who never bothers to change the default font in your Word documents from Times New Roman, then I'd recommend you stay away from this film altogether.Unfortunately, even those who are keenly aware of typefaces may find this movie disappointing. My main criticisms:1. It spends long sequences showing us examples of Helvetica signage used in various contexts. Some are elegant and clean, many are torn old posters, ragged pieces of letters peeling off walls, etc. These sequences were artistic and okay at first, but maybe after the fourth one, you find yourself reaching for the fast-forward.2. It spends the vast majority of its time in interviews with various designers discussing their impressions of the font's "meaning" or its impact in the history of design. This should have been perhaps 30% of the film, instead it is closer to 80%.3. It doesn't spend enough time looking at the technical details of the font. There are occasional off-hand references by some of the interview subjects to various features of certain letters, but even those segments are not illustrated. I would have loved to see a side-by-side contrast between Helvetica and similar sans-serif fonts used earlier, or perhaps others created since then. In one sequence, we catch a glimpse of one of the original large-scale drawings for one of the letters; I would have enjoyed seeing more of those, larger on the screen, and with explanation of how the various parts work in relation to one another.With its current affective emphasis, this would have been an acceptable 45-min. documentary, but at an hour and a half, it is far longer than it needs to be. I hoped to walk away with an understanding of what made Helvetica uniquely popular, but that was never clearly shown in any way.

bandw It is interesting how many subcultures there are concerning topics that most people rarely think about--model trains, Shaker furniture, Stone Age tools, and so forth. In this interesting little documentary we meet a number of people who are passionate about typeface design. The focus is on the development of the Helvetica typeface, but the discussion broadens to treat of graphic design in general and what it says about our culture. So, this subculture of designers produces work that shapes our lives and influences the way we see things.The film shows ample examples of how ubiquitous the Helveltica typeface has become, to the point that we more or less accept it as the default, like it has always been with us. But in truth it was designed in Switzerland in 1957 ("Helvetica" is Latin for "Switzerland"). One thing that impressed me with the interviewees is that they view their profession not just as a commercial venture but as a personal life mission. They can speak eloquently about their craft. Each type character is viewed as a work of art and to them a typeface can be appreciated as others might appreciate a Monet painting. These people can become ecstatic when describing how inter-character spacing can make words things of beauty, or ugly. One guy tells the story of how his wife was trying to describe where a store was and he says, "Oh, you mean the store with that ugly font." The general feeling is that Helvetica is pretty much the end of the line in the evolution of modern, clean, simple, easily- read typefaces. Any further developments along those lines will be nothing more than alterations of Helvetica.Of course there are those who view Helvetica as boring and pedestrian and strictly utilitarian, to be used only by those with no imagination. That view is represented by some of those interviewed. One of the more interesting parts of the film is a discussion of how companies use certain typefaces to express what they stand for. Giorgio Armani or Nieman Marcus are not likely to use Helvetica in their ads, whereas Walmart is. Although touched on briefly, I would like to have seen more examples of typefaces that pre-existed Helvetica, making a stronger case for why Helvetica has come to dominate.Almost everyone will come away from this film with a keener appreciation for typefaces and graphic design and the role they play in our lives. The final credits prove that using various Helvetica font sizes in different colors can have a most pleasing effect.