SI520

Helvetica Reflection by Pei-chih Shih

Helvetica is a sans-serif typeface which is widely used now. This typeface can be seen
almost on everywhere in our life, such as the subway signs on New York City’s
Metropolitan Transportation Authority. This font is developed by Gary Hustwit in
2007.

After watching this video, I thought the video is informational. That is, it did convey
the greatness and usage on our life to the audiences; however, it did not avoid
mentioning that the prevalence of this typeface has backfired. The group of the
audience that this video aimed at is not the professional or experienced designer;
instead, they tend to focus on the common people who are not designers and even
just have little knowledge about fonts or the principle of graphic design.

The topic of this video is relevant with the visual communication on our course. The
visual communication as the name literally described that the visualization did
communicate with the audiences and aim to express ideas and moreover the
emotions. As mentioned about typeface, the font, size and color definitely will
represent kind of image about an item or a concept and affect the emotion of the
audiences. For example, the black background color was written by white text with
Helvetica, the emotion might be strong and the image is impressed.