Nerding up for the evening

This weekend, Ben is at an overnight geekfest, so I'm indulging my own inner nerd and spending my evening in the traditional manner: eating single people food*, painting my toenails and watching documentaries that Ben hates. I'd been looking forward to tonight's show for literally months: tonight, I got to watch Helvetica.

As you might have guessed, Helvetica is about a typeface - more specifically, the mother of all sans serif fonts. It was heralded as the savior of design in the sixties, hated as a corporate symbol in the seventies, spurned as obsolete in the eighties, and grudgingly re-accepted by some designers in the late nineties after ubiquitous grunge fonts left them seeking a cleaner aesthetic. It is everywhere you look, and I do mean everywhere - tax forms, NASA and about a bajillion retail brands all use some form of Helvetica:

I found this endlessly fascinating. In my former life as a fine art student, I adored the type segment of my graphic design class, which I'm sure comes as no surprise - the sweet precision, the ability to tweak the tiniest element, the beauty of every detail...just dreamy. Anyway, it was a brilliant documentary, and love it or hate it, you have to admit that Helvetica (which celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) is here to stay.

As a side note, I'm now slightly obsessed with a brand that was briefly shown during a typeface montage: Freitag makes bags and accessories from recycled products, most notably old truck tarps. Which means you can get a messenger bag that looks like this:

Or a wallet that looks like this:

Or even a tote that looks like this:

I'll take twelve.

* Single people food = stuff you can't get away with eating as a meal when family are around. Like making a dinner of just crackers and cheese. Or a pack of Oreos and a glass of wine. Oh please. Like you don't eat random crap when you're alone.