On to Amsterdam (one of my favorite cities) and two sold-out screenings at the classic cinema/bar Kriterion. As part of the event, a group of second-year design students from the Rietveld Academy came out and did custom-painted window lettering and installed an exhibit of Helvetica-themed remix posters of their favorite films.

Rietveld students at work

Movie poster exhibit

Special guests included Dutch design legend and Helvetica star Wim Crouwel, who also particpated in a post-screening panel discussion with me, Marco Walser from Swiss design group Electrosmog, and Joost Daamen from International Documentary Festival Amsterdam.

Crouwel on the mic

Experimental Jetset’s Danny, Marieke, and Erwin were also in the house, and designed the flier for the event. But My Little Underground’s Femke Dekker was the superstar of the evening. Not only did she organize the event, but she intro-ed the screenings, moderated the panel discussion, and then rocked the decks as DJ for the afterparty! Damn! I could only last till 2am, but the party was still going strong when I staggered off into the rainy night.

Thanks to Vi, Marthe, and everyone at the Kriterion, to the Rietveld gang, the Jetset, and of course, to Femke, for throwing a world-class Helvetica party, Dutch style.

Tuesday I arrived in Thessaloniki, Greece, for the 3rd International Conference on Typography and Visual Communication. It was font-geek central, Macedonian style. Braving 95-degree heat, I put one of the film posters up at the conference registration center, but 10 minutes later it was gone! I asked the staffers what happened, and they told me someone from the Design Museum had taken it. Since it was the only copy I’d brought, I was not pleased… but I later discovered that the culprit was renegade Greek design curator Stergios Delialis, who earlier that day had delivered a stream-of-consciousness presentation entitled “Helvetica: Still the Perfume of the City.” Armed with props including a cuckoo clock, a Toblerone bar, and the Communist Manifesto, Delialis read the lyrics from Donovan’s “Colors”, did some action painting, and somehow tied it all up with the closing statement, “Helvetica is still the perfume of the city!” Amazing.

Stergios Delialis in action

Stergios is the director of the Thessaloniki Design Museum, and invited me to the opening of their latest exhibition the following night:

Stergios’ psychedelic Helvetica poster

I love this guy! Apparently the Design Museum, which is the only one in Greece, has been homeless for the past ten years, struggling to maintain funding while hosting their exhibitions in other organizations’ spaces. It’s a real shame, because they’ve got a great collection and Stergios is a true character. Later, I found out that he’d taken our poster, made a full-size duplicate of it on their color-copier, and then re-hung the copy at the conference center. So now I can say that we have a poster the collection of the Thessaloniki Design Museum. Or the Experimental Jetset (who designed the poster) can say that.

We screened the film in the stunning Olympion Theater, a classic room with a vaulted ceiling and three balconies. After the screening a bunch of us ended up at a bar called Residents, where a DJ friend was spinning a sweet mix of Suicide, Pavement, Spacemen 3, and other hits. Later I found out the DJ was the guitarist for the Greek indie band Dread Astaire, who sound like, well, a sweet mix of Suicide, Pavement, and Spacemen 3. And more.

The next night I had a chance to have dinner with conference organizers Klimis Mastoridis and Gerry Leonidas, and Helvetica interviewee Neville Brody.

Note the “Erik” name tag… a reference to Herr Spiekermann’s not making it to the conference…

Thanks to Gerry, Klimis, Anna, Apostolos, Stergios and Kostas from the Design Museum, and everyone at the ICTVC!

New Yorkers, get ready for all the Helvetica you can handle. We’re happy to announce that Helvetica will have its NYC cinema run at the IFC Center, starting September 12. We’ll have a slew of superstar designers from the film there for the opening week’s screenings, along with myself, superstar editor Shelby Siegel and superstar cinematographer Luke Geissbuhler. Stay tuned for details and advance ticket purchase info.

Two of design’s foremost critical voices, Ellen Lupton and Emily King, give their takes on the film in the new issues of Metropolis and Frieze, respectively.

After two great premiere screenings in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center (shout out to the staff at the Film Center, Jim Coudal and crew, plus late night diners John Lee, Jenny, and Malcolm), I headed to the Washington DC area for the AFI/Discovery Channel Silverdocs Festival.

I’d never been to Silver Spring before, but if you’re looking for Mexican karaoke bars, this is the spot for you. Our screening Saturday had sold out (the theater was only 200 seats) so they added an additional screening Sunday night in their 400-seat room and that one sold out too. I’m still so grateful for, and amazed at, the turnouts we’ve been getting. Thanks so much to the Silverdocs staff and to everyone who came out, I hope you enjoyed the film.

I was only there for two days, so I didn’t get to see that many other films. But I did get to catch part of my friends Lance and Sarah’s excellent new film Waking Aphrodite, a doc about Sarah’s mother, who’s a sex therapist. I also saw a little bit of Big Rig, the trucker documentary, which seemed well done if not a bit too “quick”… you only spend a few fast-cut minutes with each trucker before you’re onto the next one. But it looked great, and the Buck-65 soundtrack worked well, I thought. And congrats to AJ Schnack, who’s Kurt Cobian film won the Cinematic Vision award for cinematography. Good on ya, AJ!

Monday I started a sixteen-hour trip to Thessaloniki, Greece, via Munich. Will dispatch from Thessaloniki (Greece’s second largest city) soon…

Apparently I’m on a checked shirt kick.

Got into San Francisco Tuesday night, hooked up with my friends Biki and Brian and went to see Hot Chip at the Fillmore. I’d actually never been to the Fillmore before (I didn’t go to the shoot we did there for the Wilco film) so that was cool. On Wednesday night we had two sold-out screenings at the Embarcadero cinemas, which were both a blast, but I was so exhausted after the 10pm screening that I can’t even remember what I said during the Q&A. My memory lapse may also have something to do with the after-drinks at Tosca… I love that place.

Special thanks to Don Savoie, Amy Gustincic, and everyone at AIGA SF for organizing the evening. And thanks, as always, to Veer for sponsoring the event and giving away more of those love/hate notebooks. Cheers!

Okay, my Spanish is a little rusty (i.e. non-existent) but I believe these dudes in Barcelona have channeled the sprirt of Helvetica through a Ouija board… check it out:

…and Shelby gets a shout-out! There have actually been quite a few nice articles published recently, if I get a sec I’ll post a few links.

Movie review: ‘Helvetica’
By Michael Phillips
Chicago Tribune movie critic
**** (4/4 stars)

The wonderful new documentary “Helvetica” introduces us to a global array of typographers and design wonks delving into the subject of the world’s most familiar typeface, the one used to brand everything from IRS tax forms to American Airlines to the half-price ticket booth in Times Square.

This does not sound like promising cinematic material. Yet like its seemingly neutral Swiss-born subject, the film says a great deal without raising its voice, lending wit and grace to an inquiry regarding the way a medium, a squiggle or the precise space between two letters affects a million different messages and a billion different eyeballs.

Producer-director Gary Hustwit, who has backed several music-themed documentaries, turns here to the subject of visual music, born 50 years ago in a type foundry in Munchenstein, Switzerland. “Neue Haas Grotesk” was the original name of the font designed by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. “Helvetica,” Latin for Switzerland, proved a fortuitous substitution, and shortly after the parent companies Stempel and Linotype began marketing the font to the world in 1961, the world ate it up.

Something — everything — about Helvetica captured a clean, welcoming Swiss modernist idea. “It seems to come from nowhere … like air,” one designer marvels. “It seems like gravity.” A half-century later Helvetica has become as common (in the words of one interview subject) as “off-white paint.” And to some it has morphed into a symbol of soothing corporate imagery that cannot be trusted.

The American graphic designer Michael Bierut offers some hilarious riffs about how Helvetica went over in the ’60s, after decades of fancy, script-y, wedding-invitation lettering and a surfeit of exclamation points used to sell us products. Here, he says, was a cool, rational font that defied the exclamation point. Designer Jonathan Hoefler refers to its “finality.” With lovely conciseness, design writer Rick Poynor speaks of the post-World War II need to rebuild and rethink the graphic landscape, and the desire to suggest a more democratic universe.

Hustwit filmed “Helvetica” on high-definition video in seven different countries. The way he and editor Shelby Siegel have assembled the street scenes, Helvetica emerges from every billboard, every other shop window. The real achievement of the picture, though, is the way it sharpens your eye in general and makes connections between form and content, and between art and life. By rounding up a great group of eloquent obsessives eager to explain their feelings about a font, Hustwit has come up with 80 unexpectedly blissful minutes.

Helvetica took Scandinavia by storm last weekend with special event screenings in Copenhagen and Oslo. Summer has definitely arrived in the Nordic countries: it was 80-90 degrees every day, and a celebratory mood filled the streets. For those of you who haven’t visited Denmark or Norway, the daylight in summertime lasts ridiculously long: in Copenhagen the sun sets at around 10:30pm, and in Oslo it was even later, it was still light out at midnight! Bizzare.

I got to Copenhagen after a red-eye flight from Newark and checked into my hotel, the Fox. You may have heard of this place, each room was decorated by a different graphic designer or artist. I rarely sleep on those overnight flights, so I was trashed and needed some rest. But when I opened the door to my room, here’s what I was confronted with:

Aside from the fact that graffiti and street art are over (more on that topic later), this wasn’t exactly the tranquil setting I was hoping for. I went back downstairs and asked for something “more chill” (this took a little translation effort) and ended up in a room designed by Rinzen where “the good spirits of sleep watch over this room, fluidly roaming the walls and ceiling. They grin deliriously, oozing good fortune, freedom and happiness.” Uhm… okay… at least it wasn’t bright red. Overall I like the concept of the hotel, the free breakfast was good and free wi-fi on their outdoor roof deck was even better.

We kicked things off with the Sweet Talk Copenhagen premiere at the beautiful old Grand Teatret cinema. A sold-out crowd of 325 Danes packed the place, and local design heroes e-Types screened a cool animated 5-minute font film to start the evening. Thanks to Simon and Casper at Sweet Talk for organizing, and big thanks to Tiger for the huge refrigerator of free beer.

Kicking it with Jens and Jonas of e-Types.

And I’m officially adding Copenhagen to the “cities in Europe I could definitely move to” list… I ended up missing my flight to Oslo the next morning (by a mile). Those Danes can drink, let me tell ya.

I headed east to Oslo for the Grafill Summerparty premiere, held in another great space, an old converted factory called Fabriken. The Norwegians laid out a tasty spread of fresh boiled mini-lobsters, spicy grilled corn, boiled potatoes, and BBQ chicken for 200 people in an outdoor courtyard. After the film screening, the party moved indoors with DJs and more Helvetica (ugh), projected letterforms above the dance floor. At 2am everyone headed over to Blå, the alt live music venue across the river for more revelry, but I could barely keep my eyes open at that point. Thanks to Christian and everyone at Grafill for the hospitality.

A Helvetica summerparty in the blazing Norwegian sun.

The next day I had a chance to hang out in Oslo, where the entire city had turned out for a weekend street festival to kick-off the summer. I gorged myself on free fresh grilled salmon and laid on the grass in the park overlooking the harbor. Ahhh… Scandinavia.