The folks at Extensis are running a Helvetica Haiku Contest, and the grand prize is an Experimental Jetset limited-edition letterpress print. You’ve got until March 23 to submit your poem, so start rocking the 5-7-5’s. A few samples:

Oh Helvetica!
Your umlaut looks like a ring
Of precious diamonds

and

Ubiquitous font
My mom even knows your name
But I still love you

Classic. See all the entries and post your own at the Extensis blog.

There’s an interview with me by Kobi Benezri and Cliff Kuang in the new I.D. Magazine. And ironically, it’s in “The Ornament Issue.” Full disclosure, the punk/modernism quote from me towards the end of the interview is actually me quoting Danny van den Dungen of Experimental Jetset.

After a year and a half of filming, traveling, editing, and stressing, the World Premiere of Helvetica happened last night at SXSW in Austin. A sellout crowd of 450 packed into the Austin Convention Center for the film and a post-screening Q&A with David Carson and I (below). The audience was great, and although the evening is still sort of a blur for me, from the amount of laughs and applause we got it seemed like everyone really enjoyed the film.

To the 150 people who were turned away once the cinema reached capacity, I’m truly sorry. There are two more screenings there this week, on the 15th and 17th, and those should be a little more relaxed since the interactive conference is over.

I’d like to thank Jarod, Matt, Shawn, Stephanie, and everyone at SXSW for having us there and for doing such a great job with the festival. Thanks!

After a furious final week of color correcting and online editing, I’m here in Austin at the South by Southwest Film Festival. The film premieres tomorrow, and thus far I’ve just been taking it in, seeing some films (Fish Kill Flea and Silver Jew among them) and meeting some good people. The SXSW Interactive Festival is happening at the same time as the film fest, so the convention center is crawling with web programmers and designers. Not surprisingly, the Interactive crowd is just a little more psyched about the premiere than the general film population. But everyone seems excited. I’m still getting plenty of “You mean, the font???” reactions.

I caught a guy trying to steal one of our posters yesterday… which is a compliment I guess! I felt bad making him put it back, but we didn’t bring very many, and the postering situation here is sort of absurd. They only have three little kiosks at the convention center where filmmakers can put posters and fliers. So it’s a constant battle for space. Every time I walk by, someone has put their poster over ours, and two other people have put stickers over that poster, etc. It’s a mess.

I also got to see Mike Mills’ new doc Does Your Soul Have a Cold? which follows five Japanese people suffering from depression. I think most audience members were expecting some sort of exposé on the pharmaceutical industry, and the effects of American companies marketing anti-depressants internationally. What they got was a very personal, poetic film about the daily lives of the subjects, without any talking heads or ambushes of drug company execs. I really enjoyed it, but what killed me was that Mike had used Helvetica for the titles in almost the exact way that we’d used it in earlier cuts of the film (upper case, bold, big). During the online I decided to switch to a smaller, upper and lower case style for our titles. Mike’s film made me miss our big caps!

More soon.

-Gary

The Deck, the design-focused advertising network to which our site is proud to belong, has added four new member sites: Khoi Vinh’s awesome Subtraction.com (Khoi is also the designer of the best T-shirt ever) Tina Roth Eisenberg’s Swiss Miss, Airbag Industries, and zeldman.com. You’re probably already a regular reader of theses fine sites, but if you’re not, you should become one.

This is becoming a trend. Tickets for the March 22nd screening in Dallas are gone, thanks in part to the promotional efforts of Bo Parker at AIGA Dallas/Fort Worth. The only other screening that has sold out this quickly is David Lynch’s Inland Empire… so we’re in good company!

Well that was quick. The April 6th AIGA New York Premiere event at The New School is sold out. But we’re in the process of organizing a NYC cinema run, so stay tuned for more dates.

Behold the official film poster v.1, designed by our friends at Experimental Jetset. 27″ x 40″, litho printed on 100# matte paper. Now available in the shop, and we’ll be selling them at the screenings too.