So last night I finally got around to watching Gary Hustwit’s film about design and typography, ‘Helvetica‘.

The film explores the development, meteoric rise to fame and finally the near ubiquity of the font Helvetica. If you are reading this and wondering ‘Geez. A feature length film about a font?’ You should probably close this window right now.Keep reading if you do think fonts are interesting and know what a serif is and why it came about, or if like me, you happened to share a hostel room with two extremely nerdy graphic designers while at college.

(When I say nerdy I mean it. One new year I walked into the room to see my room-mates, who shall go unnamed, poring over a huge white sheet of paper with great interest. Thinking it was a girly calendar, I went around double-quick. Only to find that they were looking at Neo Sans, the new font Intel switched their logo to a couple of years back.)

Back to the film, Hustwit has done a couple of music documentaries before but this was his feature film debut. He speaks with a lot of type designers and graphic artists and the reactions to Helvetica cover the gamut from the kind of love usually reserved for first-born children to equating the font with big business (which I’ve spoken about in earlier posts) and the Vietnam and Iraq wars.

The film goes a bit weak about halfway through and then there is a lot of B-roll of signage, city streets and shop windows but to be fair, it is all pretty and generally well cut together. Helvetica is everywhere, you realise. Definitely worth a watch if you are into that kind of thing.

So I got inspired and decided to clean up the look of this site and get rid of all the primary colours except one. (Famous automobile designer Glynn Kerr once said that having more than one primary colour on an object makes it look like a kid’s LEGO block.)

As far as was possible with my meagre (read: nonexistent) CSS editing skills and through sheer trial and error I have managed to get rid of all the colours on the site barring red. So the new colour scheme is monochrome with red. As I type this out I just realised, that’s a colour scheme from the eighties!

Crap.

Leave a comment if you love, hate or don’t care much either way for the slightly new look.