Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

helvetica

As expected, I ended up passing up the Will Wright keynote in favor of font nerdity. And I’m really glad I did, because Helvetica was great. (Even though I do hear that Wright’s demo of his upcoming game Spore was awesome.)

The movie played to a packed house of SXSW Film and Interactive attendees. (It was the only screening that was staged as a joint event between Film and Interactive.) On our way into the theatre, attendees were randomly handed a little button adorned with the words “I Love Helvetica” or “I Hate Helvetica.” I received the latter — though, truthfully, I’m actually a bit on the fence these days about Helvetica the typeface. Helvetica Neue was my go-to font for quite a while, but I’ve gravitated away from it in recent years.

I won’t go too much into content of the film itself, except to say that I really enjoyed it, from the interviews to the music to the way it was put together. (For more, check out Cinematical’s review.)

There are some other clips from the film up on YouTube — including one lead-in to an interview with Erik Spiekermann, who serves (rather amusingly at times) as the Helvetica curmudgeon.