It has been way too long since I’ve posted anything over at rednoW.  Eliot is a ridiculous amount of fun but he’s definitely gobbled up some of the time I would have spent seeing films and listening to music.  However, over the past few days I’ve seen three films: Do The Right Thing, Helvetica, and OT: Our Town.  All three are worthy of a rednoW post, but I’m happy to have reviewed even one: Helvetica.

Helvetica surprised me.  That is, the 2007 documentary about the ubiquitous typeface surprised me.  Gary Hustwit released his film on the 50th anniversary of the typeface’s introduction, an anniversary most of us probably missed.  Entry into the world of those who didn’t miss this anniversary is one of the surprises of Helvetica.  This is a world of designers and typesetters, of art and advertising.  These are men and women for whom the shapes and sizes of type reflect a much larger conversation about the place and purpose of design.  Are words on a page a means to communicate or are they the communication?  Should a typeface’s meaning come from its design or from the words its letters form?  In Helvetica this debate between modernists and postmodernists takes place in public view in the form of corporate logos, advertisement, and your computer’s library of fonts…

Read the rest at rednoW.com.