davymac : pixels+print professional

Although it seems like the Helvetica typeface has been around forever it is only today celebrating it’s 50th birthday.

It’s one of those typefaces that ignites love and hate in equal measures amongst designers, celebrated for it’s ‘clean geometry’ on the one hand and vilified on the other as a safe, boring, corporate ‘cop-out’

For me it’s neither, it’s Helvetica and it just is. I like to think I employ it on merit, if the project requires that sort of look, although I sometimes find myself reverting back to it after experimenting with some of its trendier relatives.

I expect the undimmed popularity of Helvetica for 50 years now is testimony enough to the skills of Max Miedinger, designer of the typeface.

But wait… there’s more - ‘Helvetica’, the movie is coming to a screen near you soon, courtesy of film Director Gary Hustwit…

“Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which will celebrate its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives.”

You can check out more about the film here, actually looks pretty good too.

So, Helvetica the movie star, who knew!

Well, the long wait for Adobe Creative Suite to go fully Intel is over at last - and the question on many designer’s lips is ‘it’s how much!?’ ‘was it worth the wait?’

The answer from most of the Mac creative websites is a resounding yes (it was worth it). Like many creatives there was no compelling reason for me to upgrade my hardware to the new Intel Macs when CS2 did not run natively on that platform, but now that CS3 is fully Intel it’s time to make the jump. My copy of CS3 just arrived a few days ago and although I haven’t had the opportunity to really kick the tyres on it, from what I’ve seen it does indeed feel like a significant upgrade. I’m running CS3 on a Macbook Pro and it is noticeably faster and snappier than my G4 dual Ghz PPC main workstation running CS2. Speed aside the whole interface has been redesigned on all the applications, they now have an even more consistent look and feel across the suite.

Additionally the Bridge application now sports an interface very similar to Adobe Lightroom (the pro photography application). This is a good move as Lightroom has been in beta for a year before final release and has been the subject of a huge feedback loop from pro photographers for all that time. Asset management for pro photography has a lot in common with pro graphics designers.

I’m a recent Lightroom convert too, it has improved my digital photo workflow immensely, even in the short time I have been using it.

As you can tell I am an unashamed Adobe fanboy, I live in CS every day and it has served me well. In fact it is unusual for me to have to stray outside of CS when creating any core graphics work, a testimony to how well integrated the overall suite is and to the ‘real world’ value of the purchase price. So making the Intel/CS3 jump was inevitable for me, as it is likely to be for many other designers who know the value of keeping their work environment current.

I’m excited about getting my teeth into CS3, so far, so stunning.

Definitely more posts to follow on this one.