typeface: a documentary

we took a big design field trip for ten dollars' worth of extra credit and went to see a film called "typeface" in the tivoli theatre on pennsylvania (it's just a couple of blocks from my house, and kind of like the circle cinema in tulsa. i mean to watch their show-calendar and go again, it was a pretty cool place). it was fun to get everybody out of the studio for awhile to do something else: it was like having friends and a life and stuff!.

the speaker at the beginning (a previous aiga president) told us about design-week in february, which sounds like a great time, and for which i think we were all pretty excited...

and then the film started. it was endearing, sweet almost, in an imperfect-craft sort of way, filmed like real life with uncomfortable pauses and people who care too much, about the hamilton wood type museum in two rivers, wisconsin, a tiny town of 3,000. this museum is located in a functional (if no longer utilized) type workshop, and a handful of its old employees still live in the town, and are featured in the documentary.

it also featured two professors, and an art collective that call themselves "the post family," who had just bought a letterpress setup, and who were going to the museum.

it showed the man who owned the museum trying, (in vain?), to keep it alive, and to make it look nice, and to bring people in to make money... and nobody in the town board really understood what he was trying to do, or particularly cared about it. all the while, they discussed the beauty and importance of wood type as both a current, diy practice, and as a major historical step along the continuum of print.

a sad documentary, i think. ended on a particularly melancholy note: "what do we do to save beautiful historical techniques and practices from dying out with their last practitioners?" "dunno." /film.

i couldn't help but wonder a little bit why the printmakers weren't asked to see it, given how heavily it dealt with their medium. in regards to ours, as designers, it mostly just said that we, the computer design generation, were all going to get carpal tunnel and forget where art, print, and design came from.

leaving, we were all a little quiet. "well... " we said.


"guess we're gonna go back to studio and get carpal tunnel."



and that was that.