Helvetica et. al.

I've been meaning to do this post for a solid week, but just never get around to it. To my credit it has been sort of a chaotic week, starting school and getting the Denver Dog Photography site + blog up and running.

I had the Helvetica documentary on my Netflix queue for a good six months before I finally watched it. I kept bumping it down, mostly because I figured Alex probably wouldn't want to watch it. Finally though I took a Tuesday morning and watched it start to finish and FELL IN LOVE WITH IT. Put it on your Netflix queue immediately. It's part Grizzly Man, part design inspiration, part history, part pure entertainment.

I don't have sound on this computer I'm using right now, so I can't watch this whole Erik Spiekerman clip to see if it's my favorite part of his interview, but Spiekerman was without a doubt one of my favorite interviewees, so invariably it'll be worth 2 minutes and 37 seconds of your life.

While I was watching the documentary I did type some of my favorite quotes into my trusty laptop on the fly. I wasn't diligent enough to put down who said them (minor details), but here are a few of my favorite lines:

"You know, there it {Helvetica} is. It sorta just seems to coe from nowhere. It seems like air, it seems like gravity."

"You can say I love you with Helvetica. And you can say I love you with Helvetica Extra Light if you're feeling really fancy."

and this, my favorite part of the Erik Spiekerman interview:

"I'm obviously a typomania, which is an incurable if not modern disease. I can't explain it, I just like looking at type. I totally get a kick out of it. They are my friends. You know, other people look at bottles of wine, or girls' bottoms. I get a kick out of looking at type. It's a little worrying, I must admit."

This semester I am actually taking a typography course. Most of the other students in my program are working part time while they're in school, but not I! (Unless you count dog photography). So I knew I wanted to take an extra class and just about leapt out of my chair when I read this description about the typography class:

This class is a rigorous investigation of the expressive potential of typography as a critical element of visual communication and electronic media. This class presumes no background in typography. Students will be guided through project-based explorations that range from hand-rendered inter-letter spatial relationships to the typesetting of modest sets of pages.

It's like poetry.
And I have a hunch the class will more than fulfill my expectations. The professor said this on the first day of class:

"No one loves graphic design more than me. They might love it as much as me, but not more than me. If someone tells you they love graphic design more than me, I will fuck them up."

Rest assured I will continue to transcribe parts of our lectures in that class.