The height of procrastination brings news of Helvetica

So check this out because this is some­thing Cos­mic in its impli­ca­tions. Are you pay­ing attention?

At this moment, I am sit­ting in the But­ler Library on the Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity cam­pus, writ­ing my midterm for a class I’m in on con­tem­po­rary art. Or rather, I should say that I’m sit­ting here with my midterm open and books on the desk and read­ing pho­tog­ra­phy blogs. That’s not what’s impor­tant though. What’s impor­tant is this.

My art his­tory pro­fes­sor made a note on the top of the midterm that we are to use Arial (or Hel­vetica) at 11 point to take the midterm. Who knows why she stip­u­lated this, prob­a­bly because peo­ple write shit really small some­times when they don’t know what they’re talk­ing about. In any case, as you may have noticed, that’s my type­face of choice, and I, like the New York Met­ro­pol­i­tan Tran­sit Author­ity and man count­less oth­ers, con­dense the let­ters. So, not want­ing to be marked down for this, I made a lit­tle note on the top of my paper.

A small note before begin­ning. The con­densed font is a com­mon aes­thetic choice regard­ing this type­face, not one made to save space on this par­tic­u­lar assign­ment. I can’t stand look­ing at some­thing I’ve writ­ten with mas­sive gaps between the char­ac­ters. Why, after craft­ing an argu­ment, would I present it full of holes?

Yeah, ok, so I know that’s kind of weird, maybe a lit­tle pre­ten­tious or some­thing to write this kind of thing a prof, but it’s what I do any­way and I didn’t want to be marked down for it. Plus I’m pretty sure she’d think it’s funny and maybe a lit­tle endear­ing. So that’s about as far as I’ve got­ten in writ­ing this paper, but then I found this, and I wasn’t even look­ing for it.

filmposter.gif

This is a brand new doc­u­men­tary film that has just opened in New York, will be fea­tured at SxSW and will be seek­ing wider release. How fuck­ing great is that? So all of a sud­den I’m inun­dated with infor­ma­tion about the his­tory of this font (it’s hav­ing its 50th anniver­sary THIS YEAR!) and how won­der­ful is it that some­thing like a com­pletely ubiq­ui­tous type­face would have a back­story? So guess what? the film has a blog where you can keep up to date with news, but also learn won­der­ful things about typography!

I’m so stoked. How rad is it than in this moment I’m think­ing about some­thing so mun­dane as the font I’m going to be using on a paper, that a acci­den­tally by mis­take come upon this wealth of infor­ma­tion and var­i­ta­ble cel­e­bra­tion of the very font in question?

Thus, I chris­ten my new “typog­ra­phy” cat­e­gory with this her maiden post.

The uni­verse is won­der­ful and strange and works in mys­te­ri­ous ways.

Posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 2:59 pm

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