A note on type...

So I was wandering around the Internet today and found a Slate slide show on Helvetica. It's brief and interesting, and probably rips off Helvetica, the fantastic new documentary that I have YET to see because it seems to be released in my town a few months after I leave it (It's been to KC, Austin and soon to come to Silver Spring, my old neighborhood in DC...but on their Web site they SAY it'll come to Birmingham, hopefully when I'm there starting in June!)

Anyway, who am I to rant about the scheduling of documentaries without a big studio funding it. Let's just go with: I want to see this film. I personally don't like regular Helvetica because I find it to be just a tad too fat and bold. It's perfect for signs and logos because you want to stand out and be seen and (more importantly) relate to the viewer a sense of normalcy. Which is why despite my boredom with the font, I used a variation (Helvetica Neue) for my Web portfolio--my reasoning being that I wanted a easy to read and simplistic font that could be replicated on everyone's computers that also had a nice stencil for a 't' which I would say was my own personal logo style.

I'm getting off topic already! What I meant to do was post two interesting links about fonts. The first made me laugh for about five minutes because even though the movie is making fun of the kind of person that recognizes typefaces, I WANT TO BE THAT PERSON! (No, not the psycho, the type-dork)

America Psycho: Business Cards

Second, in my search online to find a screening of Helvetica, I came across this article on Mark Simonson's Web site about typography in movies. Lots of interesting fonts and points made to be shared by myself on my blog about six years after it was published. Go to town.