Review – Helvetica

Here’s a documentary in search of an audience. The only folks this is likely to appeal to are typography nerds willing to sit through an hour and a half about one type family. On the other hand, they’ll also have to be type nerds who don’t already know the history of the Helvetica fonts. Here and there we get a sprinkling of the circumstances surrounding the fonts’ historical development, particularly what they were a rebellion against and what in turn developed as a rebellion against them. But most of the interviews are self-indulgent babbling from artists who spend all their lives thinking about the tiny details that make one typeface different from another. Mildly amusing