So far about 50,000 of you have watched the video clips from Helvetica. Nice! I would really like to post more clips, but I’m facing opposition from Shelby, our editor. Here’s a typical conversation from the edit suite:

Me: “Hey, maybe we could post some of Matthew Carter’s interview on the website?”

Shelby: “Don’t give the whole film away.”

Me: “What about a few minutes from the section on the backlash against Helvetica?”

Shelby: “Don’t give the whole film away.”

Me: “How about the part where we go to Switzerland and…”

Shelby: “Don’t give the whole film away.”

Pentagram New York was kind enough to host a reception for our print series on Thursday night. Drinks were drunk, a few clips from the film were screened, and revelry was revelled. Special thanks to Michael Bierut, Paula Scher, and everyone at Pentagram for having us.

The crew: DP Luke Geissbuhler, Editor Shelby Siegel, Director Gary Hustwit

David Carson, Tobias Frere-Jones, Paula Scher, Mike Parker, Charlotte Magnuson

The gang from Veer, with Gary in the middle (with “M” ears…)

Yes, it looks just like the old Helvetica Blog… but it’s better. We switched to Wordpress, so now you can leave comments, and it’s got other handy features. If you’ve subscribed to the old blog feed, you’ll need to resubscribe to the new RSS feed here. Thanks to Portuguese blog wizard Jorge Pedroso for hooking it up. Yeah!

Cheers,
-Gary

Found this on YouTube. It’s sort of like a cross between Helvetica and Ace of Cakes… Happy Birthday Helvetica!

Font Shop International has released their list of The 100 Best Typefaces of All Time. Guess who’s Number 1?

You can read the full list at their site. It’s in German, but “world champion” translates into any language…

Sure, Helvetica was originally from Münchenstein, Switzerland, but who knew it had a holiday retreat in the hills outside Barcelona? Thanks to Richard Harrington for this photo, apparently it’s the home of an elderly Swiss couple.

Okay, is there a trend now to name your business after a typeface? First we had the Helvetica Cafe in Melbourne. Now, Pakpoom Lamoonpan, a Thai designer living in Tokyo, has sent me this photo of Helvetica Hair??? Nice. If anyone else has spotted a Helvetica-themed company, please hit me with the pix.

What happens when you shoot over 60 hours of interview footage that then has to be edited down to just over one hour? You end up with a lot of great content that for one reason or another isn’t going to make it into the final film. So this is the first in a series of posts highlighting some of that raw “outtake” footage. Some of these scenes will end up on the DVD edition of the film as special features, but some clips may only exist here on the site.

In this clip, Massimo Vignelli explains his infamous 1972 New York Subway map and the controversy it caused. Then he realizes what he should have done instead…

Coming soon: outtake footage from Hermann Zapf, Matthew Carter, Neville Brody, Wim Crouwel, and more.

After spending much time demonizing Microsoft for ripping off Helvetica with their blatant copycat font, Arial (I’m sure there are lots of other things we can demonize them for as well), it was recently pointed out to me that the Microsoft logo is actually in Helvetica.

D’oh! Maybe I was subconsciously blocking it out or something. Or maybe it was that little slice they took out of the first ‘o’ that makes it look so, uhm, high tech. In the film there’s a point where Mike Parker, who was with Merganthaller Linotype USA in the ’60s and is one of the people responsible for bringing Helvetica to America, says, “Once we introduced Helvetica, it really just ran away. It was like a landslide waiting to go down the mountain, and away it went.” That sets off what Shelby (our editor) and I refer to as the “logo landslide” in which loads of corporate logos using Helvetica are paraded across the screen. I love the fact that a company like Fendi can use Helvetica for their logo, but so can Jeep. I guess we’ll have to add Microsoft to the landslide now…

My film still of Rhoda the dog prompted Danish designer Thomas Høedholt to send this version. Obviously an older incarnation of New York City’s Helvetica dog sign. Nice Helvetica.