This week I went for a walk from the intersection of Yonge and Dundas streets to where I work on Yonge, a distance of about 200m and two side streets. I wanted to shoot as many instances of Helvetica as I could. I took thirty photos in twenty minutes, and missed a lot of the smaller print. These are some of my favourites.
Italics are letters that are sloped with a cursive stroke emphasis; Obliques are regular letters that are slanted. Helvetica has obliques, no matter what the font names say.
If a sign's been done in Helvetica, then it was almost certainly made on a Macintosh. Amusingly, the "Microsoft" wordmark-logo is in Helvetica, even though their OS family includes the cut-rate Arial in its place. Also amusing is someone complaining about Luke-warm Christianity.
Many businesses don't have a consistent look when it comes to their typography; a single sign can have a half-dozen different typefaces on it. In this case, the difference works well.
HMV is a mess of different typefaces, which is unusual for a company with a marketing budget. Here Helvetica really doesn't make sense, since it neither compliments HMV's logotype nor matches the space-invaders graphics.
American Apparel uses Helvetica quite consistently, and photographing their window displays is the dirtiest I've ever felt with a camera.
I mean, really, which store is more blatant and seedy?
And finally, we come to the thought that's been running through my head for the last couple of weeks: If you're being told what to do, you're probably reading it in Helvetica.
No comments:
Post a Comment