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ABOUT

Gary Hustwit

San Diego-based designer at the Exploding Font Company (San Diego) of Head Honchettes, Oskar and Nicotine. At Monotype, he published the dingbat typeface Head Honchos. At T-26, he contributed Superior and Superior Smudged (1996). In the 1990s, he also designed the free grunge font Gutter: I designed this ugly grunge font for the cover of a noir novel by Peter Plate called "One Foot Off the Gutter". I took Franklin Gothic, splattered it with whiteout, xeroxed it a ton to degrade it further, and rescanned it.

Klingspor link. FontShop link.

Hustwit is best known for Helvetica, a documentary film about Helvetica and the influence of type in our lives, by Gary Hustwit, released in 2007. From the web site: Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which will celebrate its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type. Helvetica encompasses the worlds of design, advertising, psychology, and communication, and invites us to take a second look at the thousands of words we see every day. The film was shot in high-definition on location in the United States, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France and Belgium. [...] Interviewees in Helvetica include some of the most illustrious and innovative names in the design world, including Erik Spiekermann, Matthew Carter, Massimo Vignelli, Wim Crouwel, Hermann Zapf, Stefan Sagmeister, Michael Bierut, Jonathan Hoefler, Tobias Frere-Jones, Experimental Jetset, Michael C. Place, Norm, APFEL, Pierre Miedinger, Bruno Steinert, Otmar Hoefer, Rick Poynor, Lars Müller, and many more. Screened in Montreal on May 5, 2007, at Concordia University, the reaction was unanimously positive. The editing, pace, music and visual content are just perfect. The humour of Hustwit shines through when he pits the rationalists (pro-Helvetica people) against the emotionalists (the grunge crowd). The interviews with Massimo Vignelli (very funny), Wim Crouwel, Erik Spiekermann (about Helvetica: "bad taste is everywhewre"), Paula Scher (she said that Helvetica was used by the war corporations in Vietnam and is the cause of the Iraq war) and Michael Bierut are very entertaining. Maybe on purpose, maybe not, Hustwit used the Germans as a comical counterweight.

EXTERNAL LINKS
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INTERNAL LINKS
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