helvetica!

that movie was so great! i tried so hard to watch it in class but mostly wound up asleep due to the thirty-odd hour day i'd been living through. salvation, however, came in the form of my boyfriend's netflix streaming account, so i gave it another try with my eyes open the entire time and found it to be an extremely enjoyable film experience.

i also loved the soundtrack but a cursory googling didn't bring up any real way to attain it? other than just getting some of the tracks from itunes and building a playlist, and even that can't get all of them. sad. i might do that much anyway. el ten eleven did the majority of it.

i took some quick little random notes of things i wanted to blog about so i'm just going to kind of expand them. as for moments, i'm not going to limit myself to two so much as i'm just going to ramble for a minute and hope that two obvious moments will emerge from what i say! 

the opening: is brilliant. i love the quiet meditation of building and printing the word using the letterpress process. and this subtle moment juxtaposed with the jump cut to the city streets, alight with text and image, flashing advertisements, moving people in bright and dull colors, and helvetica scattered throughout? perfect. i was even awake enough the first time through to enjoy that moment. it sets the stage for the film in a reassuring way: you're in safe hands, this will be a good movie. you don't have to guard your expectations.

i really enjoyed what massimo vignelli was saying when he compared typography to music, saying that the type exists in the spaces and counterforms the same way that music is found in the rests. coming from a background in dance, i can say that it works similarly: dance is what's in between the still-shot poses. i guess perhaps the connective tissue between the building blocks is always where the art is located? but that might be too big of a concept for this particular blog post.

the order in which typefaces are most simply built was really fascinating to me. to begin with a lowercase "h," which gives you the x-height, an ascender, the chance to determine whether it is serif or sans-serif, and the opportunity to decide the weight and stress of the verticals versus the thinnest places. next most useful is an "o," a perfectly round form, to be built from the weight and stress you were already working on in the "h." third recommended is a "p," which splits the difference between straight and round letters, and also gives you a descender to work with. having created "h," "o," & "p," you (basically) already have "m," "n," "u," "q," "b," & "d," which is more than enough to start you building words and testing
readability.

the idea of helvetica being immobile, so perfectly well grounded in its negative spaces that it can't slide around, held in "a powerful matrix of surrounding shapes," was something that had never occurred to me. it always struck me as being so simple and clean and unobtrusive that thinking of it as sturdy and locked into place was somewhat strange, but after hearing that, it made a lot of sense. it has less to do with its immovability and more to do with its balance. it isn't that helvetica is shackled into place, unable to move, but more that it's so comfortable that it doesn't want to. (personification of typeface: worrisome? acceptable? it seems like the only way we can really talk about them, which leads me to:)

the way that hoefler and frere-jones bantered about letterforms. was so very endearing. they throw around these bizarre half-narratives and descriptive turns of phrase and crazy associations and pop-cultural references and somehow, they know what the other is saying. the one i remember best was that something was like "belts and suspenders," and needed to be like (some kind of shoes?). my thinking is that it was a bit too overwrought, trying too hard, maybe? and needed to be effortlessly elegant. but that's a shot in the dark. the point being, they communicate in abstract verbal chains to better express the direction a letterform needs to take, which is hilarious but mindbendingly effective, considering that they're always on the same page about it.

and lastly, i enjoyed the idea that while some people have tried to accuse helvetica of being the typeface of capitalism, in actuality, it is rather more the typeface of socialism: ubiquitous and available to anyone, used by most bureaucratic institutions and public services, especially considering its element of "don't worry." i don't remember who described it as that, but they spoke of it being in a way reassuring, that your fears and stresses were compartmentalized, and would be dealt with. don't worry. helvetica's got you.