Helvetica Bonus Footage

As Gary Hustwit is currently giving his films for free, I watched his Helvetica Bonus Footage this week. You´re getting to see some very interesting personalities out of the typesetting world. Erik Spiekermann for example: „I will not read anything unless I´ve identified the typeface … My favorite letter of the alphabet is the lowercase a. It´s the friendliest. It´s the most significant. It´s the first. It is the most complex to design, because it crosses the plane three times, at the top, the middle and the bottom. There is a lot of variation in there. You have to do a lot with it. You can do a lot with it. It is how I identify every typeface. I like the look of it. It looks like some sort of a little guy with a fat tummy.“

The introductory text of the film says: The sad truth in documentary filmmaking is that we shoot far more footage than we can actually use in the final film, and sometimes what ends up on the cutting room floor is fantastic but just doesn’t fit the film’s narrative arc.

Here’s 95 minutes of bonus footage from Helvetica (actually longer than the movie itself) from Massimo Vignelli, Paula Scher, Stefan Sagmeister, Hermann Zapf, Wim Crouwel, Experimental Jetset, Michael C. Place, David Carson, and many more.