I am going to pretend for a moment that this post is about viral marketing, and the power of shameless self-promotion. And it does to some degree. Entertaining people goes a long way in the web marketing arena - it worked for Ze Frank, and many many countless others who share that sense of cynicism meets a dadaist sensibility that we, as postmoderns, find priceless.

However, I’m not really posting this video because I had a burning itch to say something intelligent about viral marketing or postmodern cynicism - I’m just a Tom Waits fan and my friend Adam sent me a link. I thought it was worth sharing with you, so I stuck it on my blog.

So, without further adieu…

I spend all day looking at typefaces, carefully considering which to use and where, how much space to give the letters, the words, and how to balance the visually artistic aspects of type with pragmatic legibility and order. You would think that come the weekend, enough is enough. Nope. My rental du jour on Sunday was Helvetica, a documentary about the most common typeface in probably the entire western world. And it was pretty damn good.

The timeliness of this documentary is perfect, and not only because helvetica reached it’s 50th birthday in 2007. As the film points out, we’ve entered into a period in history where the tools of design are accessible to the public and social networking sites like Myspace allow the user to create their own designed pages as a means of fabricating their own identity. Since everyone has become an amateur designer, what better time to cast an eye on the most prevalent font in the world? Read the rest of this entry »