Helvetica has been invited to screen at three more festivals: the AFI Dallas International Film Festival (March 22 - April 1), the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina (April 12 - 15), and Hot Docs in Toronto (April 19 - 29) which is also our Canadian Premiere! Lots more screenings coming soon…

Also, tickets for the AIGA New York Premiere event are now on sale.

We’ve added some preliminary dates to our screening schedule: New York City, Zurich, Boston, Philly, Prague, Istanbul, Berlin, Paris, Portland, LA, Laguna Beach, Montreal, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Columbus, Rochester, Seattle, Thessaloniki, Melbourne and more. Another 75 cities will be announced soon, so if yours isn’t on there, don’t worry, we’ll get to ya.

Sweet Talk, the very cool Dublin-based series of lecture events featuring visual artists, rolls into New York City next month with an impressive lineup of participants, including Helvetica interviewee Michael C. Place, punk photography icon Glen E. Friedman, and others. Presented by CANDY in association with Veer.

When: Saturday, March 17th 2007, 2pm – 9pm.

Admission: $20 + booking fee (Strictly limited capacity).
Get tickets now.

Where: Center for Architecture, 536 Laguardia Pl. (btw 3rd Street and Bleeker)

Who: Elisabeth Arkhipoff (France), BrenB (Ireland), Michael C. Place / Build (UK), Dalek (USA), Glen E. Friedman (USA), Michael Gillette (UK), Timothy Saccenti (USA) & more to be announced…

Hamish Muir (8vo) and Wim Crouwel at the opening of Crouwel’s solo exhibition at Galerie Anatome in Paris last Friday night. The show continues through April 28. More pictures via Xavier Encinas’ new design blog Swiss Legacy.

That’s right, font film fans: Helvetica will have its World Premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, on March 13th. I’ll be in attendance to answer questions and buy drinks, along with a few designers from the film, TBA. There will be two more screenings of the film at SXSW later that week, and then screenings at museums, colleges, and design conferences. We’ll be posting our preliminary screening schedule later this week, and planning another 100 or so screenings worldwide, so stay tuned.

Creative Capital is an arts funding organization which I’ve had the pleasure of being involved with. Over the years, their grants and support have helped indie filmmakers like Sam Green, Braden King, Peter Sillen and dozens of others. The grants are generous, but the biggest perk is their annual retreat during which they hook grantees up with industry professionals. They’re accepting proposals for new films and visual art projects, so if you’ve got one you should definitely submit it. It’s free, so you’ve got nothin’ to lose…

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CREATIVE CAPITAL 2007-08
GRANTS IN FILM/VIDEO & VISUAL ARTS

OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS: FEBRUARY 5 to MARCH 5, 2007

If you are working on an exciting film/video or visual arts project, we encourage you to apply in our upcoming grant round. For general information and guidelines, please visit: http://creative-capital.org/application/

To apply for a Creative Capital grant, you must first submit an Inquiry Form regarding your project. Tell us how, in conjunction with a Creative Capital grant, it will be catalytic for your artistic and professional growth. In addition, you will need to describe the influences that inform your work and how your work takes an inventive and original approach to form and content. Be prepared to present a basic budget and to identify the audience(s) for your project and any possible presenting venues.

Graphics Incognito is a great essay by designer Mark Owens (for the journal Dot Dot Dot) that looks at the connections between the use of abstraction by the early avant-garde movements and the graphic techniques deployed by American punk bands in the 1980s. Since I worked for Black Flag’s record label in the late ’80s, and got obsessed with the Bauhaus in the early ’90s, this all makes perfect sense! Download the PDF of the essay at Mark’s site.

Max Kaplun made this short film about his Helvetica-themed art school project. After nixing a “Helvending Machine” that would dispense various weights of the typeface, he settles on a suitably disorganized target and Helvetisizes it.

My favorite quote: “I began to hate Helvetica, and I could feel my stomach turn whenever I saw Helvetica on a billboard or street sign.” I hear ya, brother…

Helvetica participant and design legend Wim Crouwel is the focus of an upcoming show at the Galerie Anatome in Paris. “Wim Crouwel: architectures typographiques 1956-1976″ will run February 9th to April 28th, and there will be a presentation of the exhibition catalog designed by Experimental Jetset (who also designed the exhibition graphics, above, with photography by Johannes Schwartz) on April 26th, with both Crouwel and the Jetset in attendance.