Keep clear

Last night I went to the ICA cinema to see Helvetica, a documentary about the typeface. No doubt some of you are wondering why I didn't go to see The Bourne Ultimatum instead, but honestly, what would be the point? I'm sure it's well done, but you know, some fisticuffs, some car chases, Matt Damon pulling that face for the whole film... What is the point? Escapism? Well, this is a world where a man sets himself on fire and then drives a Jeep stuffed with gas canisters through the main entrance of an airline terminal. So in what sense is The Bourne Ultimatum escapist?

Whereas immersing yourself in the slightly arcane world of typography is completely delightful. This is a film which makes you look at the world about you in a completely different way. Unless you're the sort of person who obsesses about fonts you probably aren't conscious of the ubiquity of Helvetica. It is the film's task to make you see how widely-used is the type, and explain why this is the case.

Eduard Hoffman and Max Miedinger consciously designed Helvetica in 1957 to be a modern typeface. It is sans serif, with special attention given to the space around the letter. Each letter has a uniformity. It is clear, simple and straightforward. It is a typeface which is ideal for signage, corporate logos and general usage.

Helvetica has been almost ridiculously successful. The film is stuffed full of different usages of the typeface. Corporate logos, concert flyers, t-shirt slogans, posters, shop fronts, road signs and vehicle labels. The rest of the film features a number of designers talking passionately for or against Helvetica. These contributions are nicely judged: everybody cares deeply about typography but demonstrates an awareness that this might make them seem slightly unhinged.

It is just a joy to listen to articulate intelligent people talk about a topic with passion and humour. Michael Beirut has a fantastic riff on the parlous state of fifties advertising with its jumble of typefaces (especially "nuptial") scripts, goofy logos and lots! of! exclamation! marks! Jonathan Hoefler, pondering the difficulty of evaluating Helvetica, says it's like having an opinion about off-white paint. Inevitably the people who are against Helvetica have the best lines. Erik Spiekermann says he hates Helvetica because it doesn't break any rules, despite the fact that he's German and he likes rules. Paula Scher started designing in the seventies and regarded liking Helvetica in the same league as supporting the Vietnam war. "And the current war?" prompts the interviewer. "Helvetica caused the Iraq war!" she laughs.

Stefan Sagmeister rails against the corporate brochure whose front page consists of lots of white space, with six lines of Helvetica-set text, a small quirky logo in the bottom right hand corner and a picture of a business man. It says "Don't read me. I will bore the shit out of you." I have a lot of sympathy for this view. (Disclosure: LCMG is a company which specifies Helvetica for its corporate publications).

My favourite anecdote came from David Carson, of Raygun magazine. He describes how he was faced with laying out an excruciatingly banal interview with Bryan Ferry. He went through hundreds of fonts trying to find the ideal one to express his feelings for this interview. Finally, at the end of the alphabet, up came Zapf Wingding. Perfect. He showed us the double page spread. A photo of Ferry and - apart from the singer's name in the title - all the text was set in the wingding font. He said we could highlight all the text and convert it to another font - Helvetica? - but we shouldn't bother: it's not worth reading.

As IT people we use fonts all the time: in GUI boilerplate, in documentation, in PowerPoint slides. How often do we actively consider which font to use instead of just accepting the defaults? Well, I expect most of us like to use a mono-spaced font such as Courier when we are programming or including code samples in documents. But beyond that IT is a dreary world of Arial and Times New Roman. Helvetica is a film which tries to communicate why that is a bad thing, why typeface matters and why we should take the time to choose the right one for the task.

Last word. Most of the designers had computers on their desks. Every single desktop or laptop - regardless of whether its owner loved Helvetica's clean simplicity or loathed its corporate conformity - was the same brand. You know which one. I just hope Steve Jobs coughed up some sponds for all that product placement.

Trolling for laughs

Just recently we have had a troll visiting the OTN DB General forum. They call themselves ORACLE. They're annoying but harmless. Still every evening the Forum moderators eradicate their posts but the next day ORACLE is back. It's just like the Do Long bridge but with disposable e-mail addresses.

Here's an example from today (I won't bother posting the URL, it'll be gone by tomorrow):

Just got my new Oracle today

Oracle 12g, OMG it is so freaking cool.

I can write 9 queries in 5 seconds.

Then I laugh at all of you noobs.

^_^V 

I don't know about you but it reminds me of this recent posting from Dizwell....

Update

Since I posted this I have noticed that ORACLE is really blitzing the forum with postings. I guess they want to be considered more than just an annoying idiot. Still at the rate they're going they should have enough posts to qualify for ACE-hood by the end of the day.

Update 2

Well ORACLE now has control of the OTN forum. So undoubtedly something must be done. Rather helpfully, ORACLE has posted a list of actions which OTN ought to undertake to make life harder for trolls:

On the subject of spammers I suggest that you make so you have responsible oracle users able to ban and delete certain posts. For example, If you where honestly going to stop my spamming you should ban the account instead of just resetting all of the posts the spamming user makes and resetting the name, that is hardly dealing with the problem effectively.
Also, whoever the Forum administrator is. They should try giving more power to users they can trust such as
-N. Gasparatto
-Paul M
-Blushadow
-Hans Forbich (hes funny =P)
You should give them the position know as moderator (these are used on most forums). They should have a certain amount of control on who uses the forum. They should be able to ban (permently immoblilize the account, dont just reset the posts) and delete posts when necessary. Therefore you won't have to wait till your stupid oracle mod comes in and sweeps the place every 24 hours.

I'm slightly miffed that I'm not included in the list of trustees.

Final update of the day

Well the OTN forum housekeeper has woken up and cleared out all the messages posted by ORACLE. But it remains to be seen whether the troll will be back tomorrow.

Roy Batty writes ...

It's official - I am not a robot. Blogger's team of blade runners has given my blog a Voigt-Kampff test and determined that it is indeed the work of a human being. This verification was necessary because last week Blog*Spot put me under an Anti-Spam-Blog Order. Their anti-spam bots ( ASbots???) had locked my blog as it has "characteristics of a spam blog." Hmmpfff. So what are those characteristics?

"spam blogs ... can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text", which is possibly the rudest thing anybody has ever said about Radio Free Tooting. It was the other characteristic which rang a bell: "...along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site." The opening paragraph of my last post before the ASBO descended contained three links to pages on BCS SPA web-sites so I guess that's why the ASbots suspended my posting rights. This seems a rather tenuous reason but it's the best I can find. The ASbots don't have to offer explanations.

Spam blogs or - ugly neologism alert! - splogs are an increasing nuisance^[1]. Given the number of sites which require monitoring it was inevitable that the task of policing Blog*Spot would be delegated to automatons. Still it seems strange that the giant brains who invented page-ranking can't come up with some better heuristics: perhaps checking the Google Analytics reports and my Technorati rankings, or even just looking at my posting history. On the bright side, I was only off the air for a day or so, and it's not like I had anything I needed to say.

One final thing. The ASbots don't send an e-mail. I suppose this is because most of the sites they bust really are sploggers, so notification would just generate a wasteful amount of spam e-mails. You only find out you've been ASBO-ed when you sign in to post something. The order includes this sentence:

"If we do not hear from you, though, we will remove your blog from Blog*Spot within a few weeks."

Another good reason to have a backup of your deathless prose.

---

{1} - Especially for Blog*Spot. Apparently it's not such a big deal for WordPress. Although whether this is due to WordPress's superior technology or just because Blogger has the biggest mindshare is open to question.

Robinson In Cyberspace

It's ironic that my attempt to purchase Robinson In Space on DVD (along with London) should turn into a commentary on modern consumerism. The BFI released this DVD on the same day that Optimum re-issued Last Year In Marienbad, and it so happened that I had a £5 off voucher from HMV that had to be used by end of May. Synchronicity! So off to Oxford Street I went. Hmmm, they had Last Year In Marienbad, and they had a space in the racks for London/Robinson In Space, but no actual copies of the DVD. Oh well, obviously not in stock yet.

I had a look on the HMV web site. Now it had Robinson In Space but not Last Year In Marienbad. Besides I couldn't use my voucher there anyway. I popped into the Oxford Street HMV again at the end of the week (look, I genuinely just happened to be passing), but it was still not in the racks. I noticed that HMV was flaunting an award from some music industry gong fest recognising it as Music and DVD Retailer of the Year, despite its apparent inability to offer two DVDs in the same retail space at the same time.

At the weekend I noticed in the Guardian's Guide booklet an advert for Robinson In Space issued by the BFI but with sign saying Available at HMV. So, off to HMV again on Tuesday, the last day of May, last chance to use my voucher, to discover that that's "available at HMV" as in "not available at HMV". Now I could have spent some time railing at the staff about futility of it all - I mean, what's the point in advertising something if you're not actually going to stock it?

But instead, I just did what I should have done first off. I went shopping in cyberspace. Amazon had both DVDs at a fiver off apiece, and my order qualified for free shipping. So it cost me less money than buying it from HMV would have done. Sure I've got to wait for it to be delivered, but HMV has already made me wait nine days with no guarantee of it being in their store even a week later.

So what does this say about the state of modern commerce? Well, obviously, Amazon is going to win. You cannot beat better price and more or less an infinite number of items in stock. I do feel sad about the decline of the small independent book and record shops, but Waterstones, Borders, Virgin, HMV etc. are going to kill off those anyway. So if Amazon can really stick it to them that’s about as good a result as we're going to get. Of course, Amazon may get bloated and complacent like HMV but the web makes things different. They start to take their customers for granted in the full knowledge that another book supplier is only a click away.

Robinson In Space

Possibly I am the only person in the country to be excited by the news that the BFI is issuing Patrick Keiller's "Robinson In Space" on DVD. Partly this is just because I thought it never would make it out. After all, it is a rather niche film, consisting as it does of a series of static, peopleless shorts of modern Britain with the narrative drive coming solely from a commentary that touches on Daniel Defoe, spying, shopping, "The Anatomy Of Melancholy" and the annual tonnage of goods passing through Tilbury Docks, among other things. It just goes to prove how long that long tail really is.

The film is made more precious in my mind by the circumstances of the only time I saw it. It was showing in that fleapit du jour, the Prince Charles, off Leicester Square. The cinema publicity had managed to mangle the schedule for the week, and the precis of "Robinson In Space" had been replaced by that of another film (probably this one). Consequently, a large chunk of the audience were expecting a film in which radio astronomer Charlie Sheen makes contact with an extra-terrestrial intelligence. What they got instead was:

[EXT. WEST BROM. DAY.]
Base of a clock tower.
(V.O.) When the bus finally arrived, Robinson had disappeared to a sexual encounter with a stranger he had contacted through the Internet while we were waiting at the bus-stop.

The astonishing thing was how long some people waited before they realised Charlie Sheen wasn't going to turn up and left. Those who remained got a fascinating meditation on Britain's history and modern decline as a commercial and trading power.

Of course, the film is a lefty's view of the impact of Thatcherite Conservatism so it will interesting to see how it holds up after eight years of, well, Blairite Conservatism. Really this is a film that ought to be remade every five years (instead of tedious seventies TV retreads) but I can understand why Keiller would not want to keep poring over the fortnightly edition of Port Statistics. The trouble is, nobody else wants to either. The last time I pondered the annual tonnage of cargo passing through Tilbury docks was when I was doing my geography O-Level. At the time I couldn't have been less interested. Now I appreciate that all history (and most if not all human activity) is economics. But that still doesn't make the prospect of those HMSO statistical reports anymore appetising. So watch "Robinson In Space" and be thankful to Mr Keiller: he read those dreary publications so we don't have to.