- 50 Years of Helvetica is currently being shown at MoMA. You'll get plenty of time to hike up to midtown before the show ends on March 31, 2008.
- Helvetica, the film.
- Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface, the book.
- Linotype is having a Helvetica NOW Design Contest, the poster design contest.
The winners will be selected by popular vote. The voting will be carried out online at www.Linotype.com/helveticaNOW starting in mid-October 2007. The winners will be announced in the January 2008 issue of the LinoLetter.
Prizes
Linotype will offer prizes to the first three winners. Together the prizes will be worth more than €15,000.
Deadline
Submissions will be accepted from July 4–October 4, 2007. Entries will be made public once voting begins and not before that date.
Details
From the MoMA website:
2007 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Max Miedinger and Edouard Hoffmann's design Helvetica, the most ubiquitous of all typefaces. Widely considered the official typeface of the twentieth century, Helvetica communicates with simple, well-proportioned letterforms that convey an aesthetic clarity that is at once universal, neutral, and undeniably modern. In honor of the first typeface acquired for MoMA's collection, the installation presents posters, signage, and other graphic material demonstrating the variety of uses and enduring beauty of this design classic. As a special feature in the exhibition, an excerpt of Gary Hustwit's documentary Helvetica reveals the typeface as we experience it in an everyday context.
If you are a typographer, you owe yourself to visting these events and shopping for these goods.
If you think that Helvetica is just the same as Arial, stop judging typefaces on screen and observe the beauty of type and scrutinize the difference when they are offset-printed.
Also, please stop thinking that Arial is created by Microsoft and thus bad. Arial is designed by Monotype and is provided as an alternative that is a sans-serif that has the same metric values as Helvetica without the hefty licensing premiums for Helvetica.
Another point in mind: Microsoft has commissioned a lot of excellent typefaces, by many renowned type designers--Matthew Carter, for example. Check out Microsoft Typography.
I don't think that Microsoft designed Arial. However, they did choose choose a knockoff because they didn't want to pay for the real deal.
ReplyDeleteArial has the same proportions and weight as Helvetica, meaning it can be automatically substituted when Arial is specified and you print to a Postscript printer that has Helvetica. Yes, a few letterforms are different, but that shouldn't distract you from the core issue. It is a clone of Helvetica--a pirate.
Yes, 15 years later Microsoft commissioned some excellent typography, but I don't see how that has any bearing on the decision they made when they introduced Windows 3.1.
Read The Scourge of Arial for more.
Phil,
ReplyDeleteIf you finish reading my paragraph, you will see that I basically said the same thing as you did:
"please stop thinking that Arial is created by Microsoft and thus bad. Arial is designed by Monotype and is provided as an alternative that is a sans-serif that has the same metric values as Helvetica without the hefty licensing premiums for Helvetica."
But yes I do agree with you that piracy of any kind is bad--and the worst is probably type designs.
I am in awe of how many designers feel that it is their birth-right to just request for fonts for various projects.
Since I also designed typefaces and noted how much time it takes to perfect each face, I feel that type designers deserve their compensation as well.
Cheers,
See-ming
Phil,
ReplyDeleteIf you finish reading my paragraph, you will see that I basically said the same thing as you did:
"please stop thinking that Arial is created by Microsoft and thus bad. Arial is designed by Monotype and is provided as an alternative that is a sans-serif that has the same metric values as Helvetica without the hefty licensing premiums for Helvetica."
But yes I do agree with you that piracy of any kind is bad--and the worst is probably type designs.
I am in awe of how many designers feel that it is their birth-right to just request for fonts for various projects.
Since I also designed typefaces and noted how much time it takes to perfect each face, I feel that type designers deserve their compensation as well.
Cheers,
See-ming