In his faculty seminar talk entitled "Four Sketches", Dr. Jose Maria Arsenio G. Mariano posed the question: "At what point does the appreciation of beauty become seduction? How closely should the appreciation of beauty hew to sentimentality?"
Answering these questions, in themselves, seem to merit at least a three unit course on the Philosophy of Beauty: Exploring the Limits of a Study of Aesthetics in a Liberal Education Curriculum. Certainly they seem to validate America's current critical infatuation with the font type Helvetica, which has spawned an arthouse darling of a documentary entitled, confusingly enough (at least for the dozens or so people who regularly visit my blog entries or the several who actually click on the links I painstakingly provide for individual entries) Helvetica.
Slate explores the cult of Helvetica in a slideshow essay which you can get here, while also providing a review of authors and their favorite font types.
Photo Credits:
Picture of Helvetica comes courtesy of Wikipedia.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Helvetica and the Seduction of Art
2 comments:
wow, i read the link for helvetica, it's so nice. for an aspiring art director in advertising like me, that was very educational. i mean, i never even thought that fonts have histories. haha!
Cool, no? It's amazing how much creative work goes into things we take for granted. It's just like blogging. You put a lot of yourself into individual entries, and you never know how many people you actually reach and touch through your work. :-) Keep on writing!
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