Helvetica, which had its world premiere at the conference, presents the life story of something all of us encounter on a daily (or even hourly) basis. Created in 1957 by the Swiss modernist designer Max Miedinger as a response to the cluttered typography and design of the postwar era, Helvetica's clean neutrality and balanced use of the empty space surrounding letters quickly made it a go-to font for public signage, advertising, corporate logos and works of modernist design around the worldIn the left corner: COMIC SANS MS:
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Filmmaker Gary Hustwitt revels in his fascination with something so commonplace that it blends almost entirely into a context-less background, becoming a detective of sorts to unveil the myriad everyday places Helvetica is hiding (“It's a disease,” Hustwitt said of his obsessive font-spotting).
Earz: I found a weird website on typography, it was written in Italian I think, and had images of a gravestone lettered in comic sans. What does that say to you?Personally, I prefer Trebuchet MS.
That would only be appropriate if the deceased were a clown or comedian, but other than that, I'd come back to haunt whoever did that if I were the dead guy.
p.s In the top corner, ARIAL:
It's been a very long time since I was actually a fan of Helvetica, but the fact is Helvetica became popular on its own merits. Arial owes its very existence to that success but is little more than a parasite—and it looks like it's the kind that eventually destroys the host. I can almost hear young designers now saying, "Helvetica? That's that font that looks kinda like Arial, right?"
http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html
ReplyDeleteI guess that one lesson from this post is that the "geek phenomenon" is not just restricted to computer science, but in fact is a general cultural phenomenon.
ReplyDeleteWill this argument help us attract more people to CS ? Hmm...
Piotr
That's right ;). "Bring us your smelly, your geek, your anti-socials" :)
ReplyDeleteWhen it first came out Comic Sans seemed a breath of fresh air. It had some of the clarity of good hand-written slides. When I first saw someone using it I asked them more about their font than their talk! When I started using it, I got the same reaction.
ReplyDeleteHowever, it has some really awful characters (M and N for example) and I got very tired of it. Now I find that I simply can't stand seeing it. Arial is OK but a bit ugly - certain lower case characters aren't wide enough and the spacing is quite irregular (see how hard it is to read when there are a bunch of i's and l's next to each other).
Trebuchet MS, the font that Suresh is using here, is also my current favorite. The spacing is very even and I love those l's and g's!