After seeing Gary Hustwit’s documentary Helvetica I decided to do some custom stickers of a phrase that had been rolling around in my head for quite some time.

I did them in part to stir the pot while pointing a sarcastic finger at the ongoing (and quite harmless) argument between those of us who love the classic Swiss face and those of us who abhor it. Whatever your stance on Helvet, though, it’s hard to deny the impact that this typeface has had on design and designers around the world for the past several decades.

The other reason I did up my little Arial vs. Helvetica project was to show my absolute disdain for Microsoft’s outright plagiarism of the face. You never quite realize just how close the two of these typefaces are until you print them out side-by-side and examine them for yourself. Microsoft changed so little when creating Arial that if it were legal to sue for copyright infringement on an alphabet, MS would probably still be in court to this day. Sad sad sad.

At any rate, these stickers are available to you for free if you’re interested in shaking a fun finger at the Redmond behemoth. Send along a nice little note to info@eljl.net, and I will divulge where to send your SASE.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Design, Print, eljl. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.