Category: presentation

Happy birthday to cool, calm Helvetica

The font Helvetica is celebrating its 50th birthday. The BBC celebrates the font’s staying power as “the butter on the bread.”

The BBC - Helvetica at 50.We live in a world where we are surrounded 24 hours a day by adverts and corporate communications, many in typefaces chosen to subliminally complement the message.

Helvetica’s message is this: you are going to get to your destination on time; your plane will not crash; your money is safe in our vault; we will not break the package; the paperwork has been filled in; everything is going to be OK.

It is sans serif. There are no wiggly bits at the end of the letters. It has smooth, clean lines, and an unobtrusive geometry that almost suggests it was designed not to stand out.

Lars Mueller is a Helvetica devotee. He has published a book, Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface, and recently donated an original set of lead lettering to a Helvetica exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“It has a modern attitude which lines up with the aesthetic premises of the 1950s and 60s. Helvetica is a corporate typeface, but on the other hand it’s the favourite of hairdressers and kebab shops. It is the butter on the bread.”

Hat tip: Crazy Monkey.

Getting personal on institutional blogs

Writer and social marketing consultant Jeneane Sessum‘s recent post about how much personality to inject into a corporate blog (and the Diva Marketing Blog post she links to) both offer some serious food for thought to we few who blog on behalf of our employers. While some of us do both, how much of our personal information should we share in a corporate (or, by extension, educational) blog? Sessum writes:

Questions — Can you write ‘personally’ without sharing details from your personal life? Can a professional blog be personal and professional too and still be ‘weighty’ enough to matter?

What are the risks of integraing or separating your “selve(s)” online. And what about other social spaces–profiles on myspace, orkut, friendster, facebook; professional connections on linkedin, ‘personalities’ on second life; photos on flickr; videos, podcasts and everything else Media 2.0? Are we becoming more dissociated or more integrated?

This hits close to home for me since launching UMR‘s name change conversations blog just under two weeks ago. I want the prose to be lively and conversational — or at least readable and certainly not “institutional.” But I try to maintain a professional distance in my writing on that blog.

I liken the approach to that of the newspaper editorial writers whose job it is to present the “platform” of their employer. If we really need an outlet for our own voices, there’s always the opportunity to create a personal blog (like this one, or this) to sate our egos and give voice to our souls. Here, I can tell you that I’m digging the new Rickie Lee Jones CD, and that although the new Bloc Party is inventive and a new direction, it pales in comparison to Silent Alarm. But I won’t bring these topics up on the institutional blog. It’s irrelevant, and not appropriate to the purpose or audience of the blog.