By Jack Herbert
As far as an hour and a half feature about a font goes, I must admit, I was expecting a lot worse. Helvetica released in 2007 and directed by Gary Hustwit. Hustwit manages to conjure up a film which is informative and mildly entertaining, purely because these graphic designers interviewed feel so passionately about their craft.
Realistically though it could have been at least 45 minutes shorter, as each interview went by I learned less and less. Different designers telling me the same thing again and again about helvetica in a roundabout way got very old, very quickly. Image after image of examples of helvetica used in everyday life got very tiresome, if you were being picky you could have condensed the whole helvetica package into a 15 minute short film and still you would know as much about the font as I do.
Still there were moments that brought a smile to my face, Erik Spiekermann who feels so passionately about certain type says he is a “typomaniac,” he believes he has a fetish for type the same way men would have a fetish for girls bottoms.
Michael Beirut was so excited about the font, so passionate, he compared looking at a brochure from the 50′s against one using helvetica, to being stranded in desert gasping for a drink of water and finally getting it. They eccentricities of these designers are far and wide, the affection they have towards certain letters and words is very bizarre and to be honest quite entertaining.
I enjoyed certain parts of it and it was informative if your interested in font, but after twenty minutes I had enough. Over and over again the same points were made, each time I was less and less interested. For a group of graphic designers it’s a wonderful feature, everybody else, not so much.
