She's a Brick Haas

"I haven't been this excited about a movie premier since Star Wars."
-Melissa
We attended the Boston screening of Helvetica at Mass Art last Wednesday. For the couple of months leading up to it we wondered if it would be any good... If we were high-brow enough to sit through an hour-long discussion of ascenders, descenders, kerning and the like.
Well, Helvetica lived up to and exceeded our expectations. Half of the interviews were with the designers we look up to. They're our rock stars. We sat there nudging each other like a bunch of giddy thirteen year-olds. Up on the screen, the same sort of enthusiasm was displayed as our icons chuckled and chatted about their experiences and the back stories to their work. (We loved Spiekermann's description of fonts as his friends.) Michael Bierut's musings were laugh-out-loud hilarious.
Helvetica made us truly appreciate the luxury of technology. The most important lesson there was that having a computer doesn't make you a better designer, it simply speeds up the process.
Many of the die-hard modernists discussed limiting your library to a maximum of four or five fonts. We find ourselves in situations where we ask,"Hmm.. I've already got like two fonts working in this piece, I don't want to go crazy here." So we definitely have a lot of self imposed restraint in our work. I agree with the film's assertion that typography's primary function is to be legible and organized: it isn't the message-the words are. At the same time, our generation of designers have developed as artists at a time when Scher and Sagmeister have illustrated that type can be expressive and legible. I think we walk a line between the two schools of thought. Experimental Jetset calls it the New Modernism.
Someone in the audience asked when we can expect a sequel. He suggested a top notch working title: Helvetica: Episode 2 Revenge of the Serif.