Average Jane, Font Geek

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Last night I went to a screening of Helvetica. Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like: a documentary about the typeface. It was very interesting and entertaining and now I can’t stop noticing every sans-serif typeface I see.

When I was in my 20s, I worked for many years at a company that sold custom-printed birth announcements and invitations. My job title was "editor" but we called ourselves by our real job description, "typesetters."

Obviously this was in the 1990s, so there was no physical typesetting involved. Actually, that’s not quite true. When I first started we sent a certain number of orders away to have dies made for letterpress printing, but that went by the wayside fairly quickly.

We set people’s baby announcements and invitations in a good variety of different fonts, always making the baby’s name or event title larger and the RSVP line smaller and spacing between distinct portions of the message. There were lots of fancy fonts available: Murray Hill, Amazone, Park Avenue, Lydian, etc., but Helvetica was still a popular choice.

My desktop publishing skills have languished since then, but I still appreciate type design. The documentary featured a lot of people who either loved or hated Helvetica. I have to say I’ve never given it a lot of thought, but now that I’ve seen the movie, I appreciate it more than I did before.

If you’re a font geek, I highly recommend that you seek out a screening of "Helvetica" or rent the DVD when it comes out this fall. The screening I attended was put on by our local AIGA chapter, so you may want to check with them to see if there’s one coming to your area anytime soon.

Comments

4 responses to “Average Jane, Font Geek”

May 2, 2007

Pharmgirl

One of these days, I’d like you to help me add fonts to my computers. The ones that come with Word, etc., are so limited.

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May 4, 2007

Blondie

Um, OK, so this sounds like the best movie made ever to me. Seriously. My little editor heart is going pitter patter. And I use Helvetica all the time at work, though I do have a thing for Arial.

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May 7, 2007

Sueb0b

I was a typesetter in a fairly serious type house, back when such a thing existed. We lived for someone to come in with an obscure serif font and say “Can you match this?” Everyone would begin guessing “Caslon 224” “No, the o’s are wrong.”
My favorite fonts were Americana, American Typewriter, Florentine (Adobe version) and Optima. I like the simple things with varying widths in the letters.
You gotta give Helvetica respect. There used to be 33 varieties of Helvetica. I think that Thin was my favorite, along with Helv extended. But I actually like Franklin Gothic better for a pure san serif…
Oh I could talk about this all day.

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May 15, 2007

jenny

i can totally relate. there’s a restaurant in my neighborhood that i refuse to go to, primarily because of the font they use on their sign. i’m serious! it’s kind of like an old english, but not quite. more like that scripty font that people use on stickers they put in the back windows of their cars. anyone?

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