I watched Helvetica last night on DVD. It’s a fascinating documentary that celebrates the 50th anniversary of the almost ubiquitous typeface and explores its cultural significance. It may sound like a bore, but the film shows how amazingly widespread the font is. As one of the interviewees says it’s like the air - it’s just everywhere. (Film website.)

Here’s a clip featuring Dutch designer Wim Crouwel, an early enthusiast for the font.

The film starts off by describing how the font was created and how it came as a breath of fresh air in the fifties, simplifying design and creating a sort of democratic soft/hard font that was both reassuringly clear and comfortingly neutral.

But then the narrative pulls a switcheroo. The filmmakers interview designers who were part of a backlash against Helvetica and all that it stands for. The proponents of grunge fonts and the designer who used Zapf Dingbats for the body text of an article he thought was too boring to be readable join forces with a designer who thinks that Helvetica is the font that supported the Vietnam war.

And here’s Neville Brody and Rick Poyner on how to choose typefaces.

I remember the excitement of discovering fonts on my Mac Plus back in the early 90s. For a long time, the ability to print out professional-looking designs and proposals was a competitive advantage for my business. I had a Mac, PageMaker and a LaserPrinter at college - when I designed and sold my first games. At the time, I don’t think many of my publishers had kit that was so good. Later, I bought a Canon colour inkjet printer (it cost thousands!) and I could produce very high quality colour proposals for my games. That printer (and the software, fonts and computer behind it) built my first business. I often wonder whether I’ll find any other technology that will have the same impact on me personally. I think we’re all much too technologically-minded now for anything like this to remain a niche product for long.

But it had never occurred to me that a font could be so rich in history or deep in controversy. Or have such an impact on the world. This documentary is delightful and eye-opening. It’s made me think very hard about the fonts I use at work and what they say about me and my business.

Here are a couple of previous articles on this site about typefaces: What font do you write in?, and the Interesting links (See What’s the right font?)

PS Apologies for the double posting. I’m still working out the kinks involved in getting video into posts.

I’ve finally got my home cinema set up. Here’s the line-up:

• Samsung 40″ 1080p LCD TV. Very nice screen. Has a PC input as well as two HDMI ports.
• Hush Media Centre PC. It runs Windows Vista Ultimate. It came with an HD sound card and a Hauppauge twin-input video capture card and a graphics card with an HDMI output (although I use the VGA port instead because my TV had one). It’s designed to be ultra-quiet thanks to aluminium cooling fins. I had a lot of problems with drivers and the TV signal but a new signal booster and lots of downloads later, the whole thing works like a dream. With 500GB of hard disk space, it can record something like 400 hours of TV and the video card does a great job of upscaling to 1080p. I bought Microsoft infrared Media Center keyboard for £20 from Novatech. (Don’t pay more than this - Amazon and others were charging close to £100. Also be aware that the mouse pointer on this gadget is terrible - just about usable for the odd login only.)
• Sky HD satellite decoder. Great sound quality and picture quality from HD channels. I just wish it had a bigger hard disk so I could keep more stuff. The 160GB capacity is enough for three or four HD films only. My only gripe here is that Sky’s HD website obfuscates the fact that you have to pay extra to get HD movies. It sort of implies that the £10 a month HD subscription also includes the two HD movie channels. It doesn’t.
• Arcam DV137 DVD player. Awesome DVD player. It upscales to 1080p. With new DVDs, the picture quality is the same as ‘true’ HD off the PC or Sky box. Lord of the Rings is particularly good.
• Arcam AR350 Receiver. Nearly a 1000 watts of neighbour-aggravating sound. The PC, Sky and DVD player all hook up via optical audio cables. The Sky and DVD use the HDMI for video. I haven’t turned this up beyond about 50% of its full capacity. I wish I lived in the country so I could dial it up to 11. It rocks.
• B&W PV1 Subwoofer and B&W satellite speakers. The subwoofer is particularly cool, as a piece of sculpture and as a chest-thumping speaker. I hadn’t realised how important sound quality was to watching films until I got this setup. Sky HD programs and the DVD push out 5.1 surround sound and the experience is very different from watching regular TV.
  

However the key to the whole thing is to get a programmable remote control. This replaces (in my case) five separate remotes and makes it much easier to use the whole stack.

• Logitech Harmony 1000 programmable remote. I bought this from Amazon after extensive research. It’s easy to set up using a PC and the internet. It’s made of shiny aluminium and has a touch screen. With a bit of fiddling (well a day, actually) I got it set up to control everything beautifully. I think I could probably set it up again from scratch in about fifteen minutes, knowing what I know now. Certainly, adding the two Arcam boxes took ten minutes.
  

Lastly, I also got a couple of cheap reclining armchairs from Furniture Village and a huge curry from TiffinBox. A good sit down and a curry are essential parts of the home cinema experience.

Here are some tips from my experience:

• Read the manual before you start playing around with programmable remote controls.
• Make sure your PC is certified Vista compatible before you buy it. I had to flash the BIOS, reinstall Windows twice and download new drivers for motherboard, graphics, sound and video capture card. (Mind you Hush technical support was first-rate, the machine is beautiful, silent and works fine now and Evesham couldn’t even deliver one when I order a media centre PC from them.)
• Don’t let Hi-fi shops flog you expensive cables. They wanted to charge me £50 each for three fibre optic cables. I bought cables from Amazon for £8 each. It’s digital. Cable quality doesn’t matter. At least it doesn’t matter worth £150. Similarly, I was sold a pup on speaker cables, HDMI cables etc. You can easily waste £500 on cables for a set up like this if you let the ‘experts’ baffle brains with bullshit (”Do you want woofers and tweeters with that” comes to mind.)
• Choose your supplier carefully. Martin Kleiser charged me a lot of money for ‘project management’ and provided virtually none. They also tried to nickel and dime me on cables (e.g. £75 for a roll of Cat 5 cable when I only need 20 or 30 meters). They were particularly keen on flogging me gold-plated cables. They installed my Sonos system (well actually, they screwed in the speakers and I set up the software) and ‘helped’ with the cabling for the home cinema but I got so fed up with their nonsense that I bought all the kit and the final installation from Sevenoaks Hi-Fi in Ealing who were much more helpful and less haughty. They also gave me 30% off the TV, 25% off the speakers and 15% off the receiver and DVD player. This is a significant saving.
• Plan your cable runs and test your cables. If you are embedding cables in the wall, you need to coordinate between your builder and your hi-fi installers. Get the cables tested before you re-plaster. Ideally, bury cable trunking rather than cables so you can run new cables through if necessary. Make sure you embed all the cables you’re going to need. Because of Martin Kleiser’s negligence (see above), I have one duff cable which means a surface mounted replacement plus only one of the three cables that run out of the TV are embedded in the wall. It actually looks okay (because of the layout of the room, doors and things) but it could have ended up looking terrible.
• Test the digital TV signal first. I had a strong digital TV signal but an electrical problem with the distributor / amplifier was causing it to drop out every few minutes. Getting an aerial company out and testing it properly helped diagnose the problem. I replaced the signal amplifier for about £80 and it works perfectly now. However, I spent a day trying a lot of other things to figure out why the signal was hiccuping first.
• Get professional installation help. I’m a certified geek and I love playing with all this stuff but I think the guys from Sevenoaks really knew their stuff and got the stack set up in four or five hours whereas it would have taken me a couple of days. I’m geeky but not that handy with powertools so I needed help from my builder and installers to mount the speakers and TV bracket.
• 1080p matters. Several people told me not to bother with 1080p. However, the small marginal cost of getting a TV that can do it means that I can get the best possible signal out of all my other devices and, especially, my PC which runs in full 1920 by 1080 pixels - great for photo slideshows and presentations.
• Did I mention the curry?

Technorati Tags: HD, High Definition, 1080p, Logitech, Samsung, Arcam

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is the one book you MUST read if you are in any kind of professional, knowledge worker business. Although it is written for the software companies, in fact it is packed with insight that applies to any business where people work with their brains.

It talks about the kind of working environment you need to ensure maximum individual productivity (two person private offices, big desks, lots of shelves etc.) and to maximise concentration (stop paging people over the PA) and to ensure maximum team productivity. As the name suggests, the authors think that people are the critical ingredient for project success. It’s also a short book - about 220 pages.

I was reminded of this essential book when I read an interview with Tim Lister this morning about his new book (hat tip: Slashdot).

Other related books that I highly recommend: The Mythical Man Month and Other Essays on Software Engineering(summed up by an old colleague of mine as “it doesn’t matter how many times you have sex, it still takes nine months to produce a baby”) and Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules (a bit of an epic but biblical in authority as well as length) and Frederick Herzberg’s classic: One more time: how do you motivate employees? (clue: more money won’t do it).

Technorati Tags: GTD, productivity, teamwork, Peopleware, Mythical Man Month, motivation, concentration

I’ve been reading Bruce Pilgrim’s book, Talking to My Cats: A Small Business Journal, and it’s a hoot. It’s more of a memoir than a book of guidance for budding writers. And when I say memoir, I mean bitingly funny stories of copywriter-abuse.

As a marketing guy myself, I can sympathise with the situations he describes - the crazy bosses, the do-more-for-less clients, the ups and downs of being your own boss. In fact the only point on which we seem to differ is that he has cats and I do not.

It has one especially valuable piece of advice: “Don’t let your babies grow up to be copywriters.”

I know it’s a bit recherch? to review a book review but I read one this morning that I thought was particularly well written.

It’s a review of Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The book is by Vincent Bugliosi and the review is by Thomas Mallon and it is published in June’s Atlantic. You can read the review online and also an interview with Mallon.

It’s an interesting example of the reviewer using a book to talk about their own experiences. It’s also an example of a review that says more about the reviewer than about the book. In this case, it’s no bad thing but I wonder how long this has been happening.

There are two phrases that I thought were particularly arresting:

“In explaining the assassination, the conference’s registrants cast aside Occam’s razor in favor of a Texas chain saw…”

Incidentally, Occam’s razor is very useful. It says “entitia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem” or, in English, entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. In other words, the simplest explanation is usually the most likely. Incidentally, In Our Time did a great programme on William of Ockham (their spelling!) a couple of weeks ago.

Another line that I liked is near the end:

“Similarly, in knocking down the conspiracists’ shantytown of constructs, Bugliosi has had to save the village in order to destroy it…”

I think both examples are clever, to the point and entertaining. It’s hard to write like that and too much of it gives me indigestion but a little bit is pure fizz and ginger.

PS This post was typo city when I first wrote it.� Thanks to readers who spotted them.

Jumptags is like a cross between del.icio.us and a DOS command line (or Windows Vista Search if you prefer your DOS searchified). You can use it to store RSS feeds, web pages, Skype contacts and access them with a few key strokes. You can also build up collections of things and share them with friends or everyone.

Technorati Tags: Jumptags, del.icio.us, social bookmarking

Last week my Orange C600 phone finally did my head in. It kept crashing and the little joystick wouldn’t point downwards. So I decided to replace it.

Writing emails SMS-style with a numeric keypad is hard work. (I think people younger than me have some genetic modification that means they can do it.) So I wanted a phone with a Blackberry-style keyboard. I already had an HP phone with one but it’s too big and heavy to go in my pocket. It’s got GPS on it so it’s great for the car. I wanted a pocketable smart phone, with a keyboard that worked with my server.

I ended up buying a Samsung I600. It’s very cool - much slimmer and thinner than it looks in the pictures. Plus it’s black and shiny in the same way that the monolith in 2001 is black and shiny. It’s got a little scroll wheel on the side which is good for browsing email. The little keyboard means I can write messages much more easily than on my old phone. I’ve had it a week or so and I’m really pleased with it.

So then fun began. I have always synchronised my phone with my server. I have Microsoft Small Business Server 2003, which I set up originally because I was writing some copy for Microsoft about it and wanted to understand it properly. But I never got round to encrypting my email or setting up Blackberry-style push email. So that’s what I did over the weekend. I bought an SSL certificate from Go Daddy and followed these instructions from Microsoft. I had to go through the process a couple of times - there are several ways to screw it up and I had to convert Go Daddy’s certificate into a .cer format and also import it manually into my browser; but basically it all works now.

It’s weird and wonderful to have my phone beep whenever I get a new mail. And comforting to have it secure.

I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I find that a proportion of my email never reaches its intended recipient - it just gets caught in spam filters. Very annoying since, obviously, I’m not spamming people. So my other geek project, last weekend, was to set up an SPF record for my outgoing email. I used to route all my outgoing email through Zen, my ISP. But increasingly I was getting bouncebacks from people saying that the sender was on a Spam blacklist. (There’s a great tool on DNSstuff you can use to check if a domain is listed on a spam blacklist.) So I switched my server back to sending email directly and I added an SPF record to my DNS record to give some measure of sender authentication. I don’t think this is going to solve the problem completely, but it was fun testing it with Google Mail and seeing the header show that my email had been cross checked and had come from an authorised server. There is a cool wizard on Microsoft’s site that will help create an SPF record.

I enjoy tinkering around with technology. It helps me with my work too - keeps my geek credentials up-to-date. My next project is to figure out the whole HDTV home cinema thing and get a cheap system set up.

Technorati Tags: Smartphone, Samsung, I600, SPF, spam, Sender ID

This is a review of Life’s a Pitch by Stephen Bayley and Roger Mavity. (Actually, it’s a chance for me to quote them, criticise them, give them some grudging praise, make a joke or two and display my own prejudices. Another disclosure: the publishers sent me a free copy of the book to review.)

The authors, both advertising mavens, reckon that everything we do is a matter of presentation and persuasion. Well, they would, wouldn’t they. I was attracted by the bold red cover and the subtitle

How to be businesslike with your emotional life and emotional with your business life.

But I was also skeptical that a book about pitching, like books on networking (socially, not with Cat5) and ‘winning friends and influencing people’ might leave me sadder but no wiser.

The first half of the book is full of the kinds of obvious-but-nicely-put tips that you might find in the blogosphere:

• Put time in your diary for thinking.
• Groups of three or four are more creative than committees of six or seven
• When brainstorming, use a 2B pencil so you “physically can’t write in fine detail”
• A pitch is a story about a problem and a resolution
• Write a summary. Work hard on it but put it at the end of the pitch
• Write your pitch BEFORE you start working in PowerPoint
• Don’t read out what’s on the slides
• If you’re going to an interview, read the company’s annual report first
• Passion beats logic (which is presumably why corporations refer to their own passion frequently and with the sincerity simulator turned up to maximum)

The authors have a nice line in friendly but punchy copy. Try this: “PowerPoint is to communications is to cooking.” The book reads well.

On the other hand, it feels that the authors, or perhaps their designer or publisher, weren’t that confident about the length or depth of the material. The type is large and there is lots of white space on the page. Nearly every page is broken up with a large pullquote. Did they want the book to be as big as physically possible? It’s 250-ish pages long but could probably fit in a 60 page paperback with a different design. Does anyone write essays or tracts any more?

This is obviously a book of two halves. Early in the book, the opportunity to run full colour illustrations is wasted on snippets of clip art - a calculator, a box of pencils and so on. In the second half, eclectic images, such as the picture of Brunel and his chains, lift the text and enhance it. This suggests that the second half of the book, on personal pitching, is where the authors’ hearts were. This feeling is reforced by the writing. It is prosaic but worthy in the first half and becomes rich and irreverent in the second.

I would give the first half of the book - on pitching in business -5/10 for effort. There are some useful observations based on experience but there are blogs, such as Presentation Zen, which will get you there faster and better.

The second half of the book, which is the bit I thought I would dislike, turned out to be a delightful combination of historical anecdote and a sexualised updating of Dale Carnegie’s classic, as applied to letters, lunch and language. 10/10 for panache.

PS The title’s not the best thing about this book, but it is typical of the authors’ attitude and style. Still, Don Peppers got there first with a different book and a better title: “Life’s a pitch, and then you buy.”

I’ve been busy building websites for people recently. Here are the latest additions:

• My wife’s updated site: www.aileengonsalves.co.uk.
• Her theatre company: www.ccompany.cc.
• My mother’s new business: www.winterbourneevents.com.

WordPress works well as a tool for build quick, simple websites for people.

The Economist reviewed Carly Fiorina’s biography, Tough Choices last week. Like the curate’s egg, they reckoned it was good in parts.

The review closes with a damning paragraph:

Her bigger theme is leadership, and this is where Ms Fiorina fails. Again and again, she interrupts a good narrative with vain and verbose harangues about corporate strategy. From one paragraph to the next, her language becomes wooden and cliched as she descends into meaningless jargon. Things such as “frameworks” are constantly being “leveraged”, usually “proactively” and “going forward”. Like most former chiefs in search of redemption, Ms Fiorina wants to be remembered as a corporate philosopher. She won’t be. But she will be remembered more fondly than she thought.

This makes me think that the corporate bullshit that passes for communication in large companies starts at the top.

Full disclosure: HP is a new client of ours, here at Articulate HQ. Further disclosure: the article in the Economist ran alongside a review of the new Velazquez exhibition at the National Gallery and a reproduction of the Rokeby Venus (”The Toilet of Venus”). Ugliness in words contrasted with beauty in art. Nice one, Economist.