Life in a Single Word

Helvetica (Originally called Die Neue Haas Grotesk) was developed in 1957 by Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei. It is so old, so yesterday, we almost always use some other font when creating a document. Not because the lettering is a bad looking font. When asking coworkers, it seems that the reason it isn’t use is because it’s the “default”.

Lucky for us, not everyone feels that way. When searching for examples of Helvetica being used, a article was found that covered 40 main line companies logos that use this as the base font. Here are just a few, to see the whole list takea look at the article over at Web Design Depot.

There are many types of ‘words’ people put on their walls to add atmosphere to an area. In offices they are usually words of inspiration or encouragement. In the house, these are generally placed on a shelf with books and nick knacks or hung on the wall. A single word that enforces the mood of the room.

We have been keeping an eye out for the right words to put on the wall in our home office. We have found a few at the local hobby supply shops, usually these are basic white on the rougher side to encourage your to spice them up with color to match the room.

Last week we took the plunge for a simple one we found at Current. We liked the font the maker had chosen and thought it matched the mood of the word quite nicely. For now it is being used as supplied, in white, but soon will be painted in a contrasting color to the wall it’s on. This is a picture from Current and not the actual one we have due to the white on a white wall just didn’t show well in the photos we took.

Available at Current – Dream Wall Word measures 6 3/4″ x 22″

A popular method to show a group of words and their quantity of occurances is in a ‘Cloud’. Many times you will see a blog that has a column box of words that are sized by how many times that word appears in a article within the pages of that blog.

A Cloud can be helpful when watching trends and you do not have time to so a pull of data and compare that in a spreadsheet. Some more artistic Clouds have words floating about and changing sizes as quantities change. This is fun to watch but not very useful if your attempting to do something with the data.

Here is a Cloud that is pointed at Twitter. Where instead of showing every word, it shows 200 matching words in tweets based on a base word you enter. You can play with it at the developers, Jeff Clark created this on Neoformix.

The strength of a single word can be enhanced with font, shadow, and depth. When typing text in a social network site, your limited to basic text. But, when sending a letter, printing, or heading a article – a more robust lettering will enrich the word message.

Here is a simple word enhanced to encourage the joy of the single word. There are many programs you can have on your desktop to create word energy… usually these are ‘logo’ creation apps.. One company I saw offer their single word enhancement software to use for free online – no download. Take a look at “XARA 3D Sampler”

Single words placed next to each other sets a mood, a scene that you can see in your mind. Join us in our office today with a dozen individual words.

We are ‘almost’ ready…