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Archive for the month “May, 2013”

14 May 2013

Helvetica: heart it or hate it?

Example of the Helvetica typeface. Image creat...

Can you spell boring?

I love type and typography. And I’ve been fortunate to have had several jobs that involved working with type, thus allowing me to pour over font catalogs, spend someone else’s money to amass a good-sized library of Adobe fonts, and fool around in Adobe Illustrator and Quark Xpress until my eyes glazed over. I even did a bit of freelance graphic design.

he who dies with the most fonts wins

I know there are numerous variations of this slogan, but this is the one that seems truest to me. So of course when I came across the video animation below of the history of typography, it was love at first sight.

People’s type tastes vary. Some people don’t even pay any attention to type. They can’t distinguish Bodoni from Bookman. If they use a Word Processing program, they just go with the default font.

Which brings me to the over-used default font of choice in the Western world: Helvetica. There are only two fonts I roundly despise, and the other one is Courier which I once removed from every single PC in the office where I was working (because someone actually went out of his way to use it; obviously, he had to be stopped).

There’s a wealth of sans serif fonts in the universe, including Univers, all of which are preferable to the dreadful Helvetica. I hate Helvitica. If you heart Helvetica, well, I’m sorry but we just can’t be friends anymore.

Posted in Art, Creativity and tagged Bodoni, Bookman, fonts, Helvetica, History of Western typography, type, typography, Univers | Leave a comment

07 May 2013

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rockstar violinist

Even if you’re not a fan of classical music, you may know about violinist Joshua Bell from the “Stop and Hear the Music” video that’s been circulating around the internet. In January 2007, The Washington Post got Bell to agree to perform what he called “a stunt,” playing incognito in L’Enfant Plaza Station in Washington D.C. for tips, and what the subsequent Post story about it called “an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?”

Sadly, it did not.

Three days before, Bell had played at Symphony Hall in Boston, where tickets went for around $100. Shortly after the January gig at L’Enfant Plaza Station–which netted him a little over $30–he appeared at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts to accept the Avery Fisher Prize for best classical musician in America. You can read the detailed, chatty April 2007 Post article here and watch “Stop and Hear the Music” here.

The number of people who passed by Joshua Bell on their way through L’Enfant Plaza Station that day without stopping (1,070) has now been exceeded by the number of Joshua Bell videos that have been uploaded on You Tube (1,090).

I could listen to him play all day.