2007 = 50 Years of Helvetica

Helvetica lovers rejoice!

1. 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.


2. Helvetica, the film.


3. Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface, the book.


4. 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.

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, a must-have for coders.

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is the best font for coding, period.


(source: Wikipedia)

The advantages of using Vera Sans Mono--the monospaced variant from the Vera family--are:

• It comes with normal, bold, oblique and bold oblique. Great for syntax highlighting.


• Unlike Courier, changing weights from normal to bold do not change the mono-text-width. In other words, if you wish to highlight your keywords in bold, your code won't all of a sudden break your indent formatting


• Unlike Courier, it carries a Gnome license and thus free. Courier comes with most Microsoft products, but is not freeware. While you are unlikely to be sued by Microsoft for your use of Courier if you do not own any Microsoft products and thus the license that comes with it, that is an illegal activity.


• It is Unicode aware and comes with the full latin set of Unicode characters so coding on your internationalization projects would always be a breeze.


• It is highly legible down to 8pt on a 96dpi monitor so you can get as many lines on Eclipse without suffering from legibility issues.


• It is highly legible when printed. Great for code documentation.

I have been using this for a few years now round-tripping from ActionScript to Python, Java to C# using IDEs like Eclipse, Visual Studio or the almighty Notepad and it never lets me down. Highly recommended.

Download the latest revision of Vera.