HELVETICA

MAX MIEDINGERHISTORYUSAGEFILMAPPEREANCE

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***************************************************************************LET‘S GET THE Fu*K STA

MAX MIEDINGER24.12.1910 born in Zurich, Switzerland8.3.1980 died in Zurich, Switzerland

1926-30: trains as a typesetter in Zurich, after which he attends evening classes at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich. 1936-46: typographer for Globus department store’s advertising studio in Zurich. 1947-56: customer counselor and typeface sales representative for the Haas’sche Schriftgießerei in Münchenstein near Basle. From 1956 onwards: freelance graphic artist in Zurich.

1956: Eduard Hoffmann, the director of the Haas’sche Schriftgießerei, commissions Miedinger to develop a new sans-serif typeface. 1957: the Haas-Grotesk face is introduced. 1958: introduction of the roman (or normal) version of Haas-Grotesk. 1959: introduction of a bold Haas-Grotesk. 1960: the typeface changes its name from Neue Haas Grotesk to Helvetica™.

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do you really need to know your antioxidant level? s there a reliable way to check my levels?

?do you really need to know your antioxidant level? s there a reliable way to check my levels?

If you can‘t think what Helvetica looks like, glance around you: chances are it‘s somewhere in your field of vision, whether whistling past on the television news or staring out at you from the local dry cleaners. Nor is Helvetica confined to the western alphabet: a Cyrillic version now exists, as do variants in Greek and Chinese. It is, I am slowly beginning to comprehend, the world‘s font.For all that, and as the film reveals, Helve-tica is indelibly associated with the country whose Latin name it pays tribute to: Swit-zerland, where a new movement in graphic

design first took root in the 1950s. Energised by advances in typesetting technology, Swiss designers were hungry for typefaces embodying the principles of modernism: clean, crisp, neutral and type foundries reciprocated with a wave of fresh designs. One of the first was Univers, an austere but elegant sans-serif face drawn up by Adrian Frutiger that appeared in 1956. It became an instant classic, its 14 different weights, ultrathin to über-bold, painstakingly numbered to offer technicians greater flexibility.

USAGE

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Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type. Helvetica encompasses the worlds of design, advertising, psychology, and communication, and invites us to take a second look at the thousands of words we see every day. The film was shot in high-definition on location in the United States, England, the

Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France and Belgium. Helvetica had its World Premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March 2007. The film subsequently toured film festivals, special events, and art house cinemas world-wide, playing in over 300 cities in 40 countries. It received its television premiere on BBC1 in November 2007, and will be broadcast on PBS as part of the Emmy award-winning series Indepen-dent Lens in fall 2008. The film was nominated for a 2008 Independent Spirit Award in the „Truer Than Fiction“ category, and was shortlisted for the Design Museum London‘s „Designs of the Year“ Award. An excerpt of the film was included in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

FILM

what‘s up sexy. you are so sexy but that is beside the point youhaven‘t called me back

what‘s up sexy. you are so sexy but that is beside the point youhaven‘t called me back

APPEARANCEEvery day we see words on signs, advertisements, emails, but we rarely stop to think about the typefaces in which those words are presented, the fact that people actually designed them, or how those typefaces affect the way we process the information they’re delivering. For example, the director of the film had the idea to make a documetary about a typeface, wile he as walking around the street. “I was walking around, looking at the type and the way people interacted with it, and I just saw the whole film in my head. I wanted to do a documentary about graphic design, and I thought - well, Helvetica is the most ubiquitous typeface in our lives, why not that?“

In one of the film‘s most brilliant sequences, one of Hustwit‘s interviewees, the writer Lars Müller, takes a similar stroll around London, a city that, it turns out, is nearly as full of Helvetica as New York. Pointing gleefully at traffic signs, shopfronts and notices that „Posters Will Be Prosecuted,“ Müller pays tribute to what elsewhere he has called „the shift worker and solo entertainer of typefaces“, the font that moonlights on the glossiest of corporate identities as well as the scummiest of homemade signs. If you can‘t think what Helvetica looks like, glance around you: chances are it‘s somewhere in your field of vision, whether whistling past on the television news or staring out at you from the local dry cleaners.

Design & Layout: Nadine Stammen