It’s not every day that a movie is made about a typeface. Well, technically it was a documentary by Gary Hustwit that debuted in 2007 at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. It later aired on PBS in January 2009 as part of the Emmy-award-winning Independent Lens series, which is the version I saw.

The film, Helvetica, subsequently toured film festivals, special events, and art house cinemas worldwide, playing in over 300 cities in 40 countries.

From April 2007 to March 2008, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City displayed an exhibit called “50 Years of Helvetica,” which celebrated the many uses of the font.

Why all the hoopla over a typeface? Well, in short, no other font can begin to approach Helvetica’s long-lived impact on the design, advertising, print and communication worlds. To this day, Helvetica continues to shine based on its simple, functional, contemporary, and timeless qualities.

Helvetica was developed by Max Miedinger with Edüard Hoffmann in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland. Miedinger, a former employee and freelance designer, was commissioned by Haas to draw an updated sans-serif typeface to add to the firm’s line. Miedinger’s new font was called Neue Haas Grotesk, but its name was later changed to Helvetica in 1960, which is derived from Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland.

Helvetica’s popularity was fed by its Swiss design roots and by advertising agencies selling this new design style to their clients. Almost overnight, Helvetica began to appear in corporate logos, signage for transportation systems, fine art prints, and a myriad of other uses worldwide. Five decades later, the use of the Helvetica typeface in our daily lives is as ubiquitous as the air that we breathe.

What does your company’s logo and typeface say about your organization? Are you giving enough attention to how your company approaches the design, look, and feel of your products and/or services?

The best product or service in the world is of no benefit if it is not seen as appealing to the customer.

Take a page from our omnipresent friend, Mr. Helvetica, and make sure you are doing everything you can to appeal to your customers. If so, your company too will find itself still looking good at the ripe old age of 53.

Quantum is the window manufacturer of choice for many of the top residential and commercial architects in the country. Its windows and doors can be found in discriminating building projects from New York to Hawaii, Washington DC, California, and the Pacific Northwest. Windows are made of choice hardwoods, including mahogany, teak, Douglas fir, and oak. Although I will not disclose some of Quantum’s residential clients, suffice it to say that many of them are household names.

Real sash weights are used to raise and lower the double- and triple-hung windows, utilizing the same technology that has opened American windows for generations. Meanwhile, cutting-edge technologies in large wall-sized sliding glass doors are able to lift and gently glide 800-pound windows with only two fingers of effort. These windows were able to shut out the loud hum of Interstate 5, which is a stone’s throw away from Quantum’s showroom.

Quantum was founded in 1984 by several homebuilders, who were dissatisfied with the lack of high-quality all-wood windows for new home and renovation projects. So they started making the windows themselves, and soon began selling their custom windows and doors throughout the region. Today, on any given weekday, you’ll find about 65 employees working throughout Quantum’s sprawling production facility in Everett, about 30 miles north of Seattle.

Quantum’s co-founder, Paul Vexler, is a trained artist, sculptor, and carpenter. These skills have certainly contributed to the company’s success in handcrafting fine window and door products to fit an existing structure or a brand new one – from the traditional to the ultra contemporary.

While clearly more expensive than machine-made, mass-produced windows, Quantum’s products are not as expensive as you might think. For example, their windows and exterior doors on a new home project might represent 12-15 percent of the overall cost of the home.

Don’t get me wrong. Plastic, aluminum-clad, and machine-produced window products are an important part of today’s housing market. Yet, like anything else, there is something to be said about the inherent imperfection of human artistry, which can add character, style, and uniqueness to a product or project.

Seek to embrace artistry and character in your own company’s work. Celebrate those employees who might find creative ways to improve your products or services.

Most important, do not let the sound of the thundering herd (a.k.a. your competitors) drown out what your customers may be asking for – something a bit more custom-made that could lift their spirits, and your stock price.

Now for the seats: they were so narrow my shoulder constantly brushed the shoulder of the person sitting next to me. Meanwhile my knees touched the seat in front of me, as I counted the pores on the head of the bald man sitting seven inches from my nose. Does any of this sound familiar?

You may be thinking that this is yet one more person’s rant against the already down-and-out airlines industry. It is not. I know the airlines’ margins are paper-thin and they are simply trying to make ends meet, like many other businesses, so I don’t fault them for that.

However, I do have one point of contention that has no bearing whatsoever on the economics of the airline industry. As the door to our plane shut on that recent flight, the one flight attendant launched into his spiel and “invited” us “to sit back and enjoy the flight” and said we should feel free to raise our headrests for “three inches of additional comfort.”

This is where the airlines, as well as many other businesses, need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new way of talking to customers — and employees. Particularly when conditions are already challenging, you shouldn’t exacerbate the situation by using ill-conceived, out of touch, or outdated language.

You need to better understand your customers and your employees, and talk to them in a realistic and straightforward manner. In doing so, you will at least be respected for your candor. Otherwise you risk insulting the very ones you are relying on for business or support.

Telling a plane full of passengers crammed into a small metal cylinder to enjoy the three additional inches of comfort by raising one’s headrest, is equivalent to telling your employees during these tough economic times to enjoy the free access to the restrooms down the hall.

Words matter. Treat customers and employees with respect and talk to them as you would another professional that you regard as an equal – or better yet, a superior. I predict you’ll enjoy the results and the comfort that higher performance will bring to your company.

Now please lower your headrests and put up your tray tables. And thank you for flying the friendly blogosphere.

When I stopped into my local Starbucks this morning to get my usual tall cup of Joe, I found a store buzzing with a new entrant in its coffee line-up – instant coffee.

I must admit I was skeptical. Instant coffee? After all these years of treating my taste buds to the full-throated flavor of my Starbucks favorite blends such as Verona, Estima, and Sumatra, how can I take instant coffee seriously? The last innovation I witnessed in instant coffee was the “freeze-dried” branding of Taster’s Choice in the 1970s, which was a must-have for every college dorm room. Today, that same freeze-dried brew tastes a little too freezer-burned to me, with all due respect to Nescafe.

Yet, my coffee snobbery this morning quickly gave way to curiosity (and the notion of something free), and so I tried Starbucks’ new “VIA Ready Brew” (aka, instant coffee), which they were handing out in Dixie-like cups. And to my surprise, I liked it. Now, I will admit that it’s not quite in the league of my favorite fresh-ground brew I’m accustomed to, but it’s remarkably good considering it is, well, instant.

Give Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz credit, it’s a pretty gutsy move. This is the same guy who swam against the tide years ago, and proceeded to build a corporate empire one cup at a time — when most everyone else at the time was saying, “you can’t get rich selling coffee.”

Today Starbucks has more than 5,000 stores in over 40 countries. Sure, it had to close a few stores over the last year and dial back some prices in light of the bad economic times. But its stock is up 75% in the last 6 months. I like that math.

So stay tuned. Will Starbucks’ gamble on instant coffee pay off? Wall Street didn’t seem too impressed given SBUX closed down over one percent today, despite its big instant coffee roll-out.

But I don’t count Starbucks out, and for this reason. Its success to date is not simply the result of great coffee and market savvy. It also has something to do with how management runs the company and how they treat their employees (or “partners” as they are called). Starbucks routinely gets some of the highest marks in corporate America in terms of employee satisfaction, and “best places to work.”

As Howard Schultz puts it, “We realize our people are the cornerstone of our success, and we know that their ideas, commitment and connection to our customers are truly the essential elements in the Starbucks Experience.”

Happy and satisfied employees lead to greater productivity and greater innovations. And companies that get this important point, and live by it, will generally prosper.

In fact, prosperity has been known to have a very distinctive aroma. It smells like a great cup of instant coffee.

A corporate culture reflects an organization’s character, its values and the vision of its management. The culture serves as an unseen GPS for employees, customers, and partners – signaling who you are as a company and how you do business.

Too many companies place a glossy mission or values statement on their website, but don’t work to build a corporate culture that truly lives up to the words.

Senior management cannot impose a desired corporate culture on an organization. It must be earned and built brick-by-brick. Management must create a culture that treats employees as the company’s single best asset. Employees need to know that performance will be measured and appropriately rewarded. Conversely, they need to know that underperformance has its consequences. And employees need to know that the same performance yardstick will be used fairly throughout the entire organization.

A culture that places loyalty to management over performance is a company abusing the shareholders’ trust. Likewise, a culture that tolerates — or worse yet – rewards an attitude that says, “all I need to do is keep my head down, go along with the flow, and not cause any waves,” is doomed to failure.

Jump-start your corporate culture starting today. Let employees know that their talents and value to the company matter. Provide a vision and a clearly defined set of goals for which all employees will share responsibility in achieving. Let employees know that risk-taking, an entrepreneurial spirit, and challenging the status quo are strongly encouraged. And make it clear that a strong sense of ethics is an integral part of your company’s DNA.

If you are able to do the above, your corporate culture will change for the better, your future will be brighter, and shareholders will happily reap the benefits.

Last month, Christie’s held the “Sale of the Century” auction in Paris of the art and furniture owned by world-renowned fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, who died in June 2008 at the age of 71. Christie’s spent $1.2 million to host the auction at the famed Grand Palais near the Champs-Elysees, which drew over 30,000 visitors to the preview exhibition. The auction itself spread over three days and raised a record-breaking $484 million — even in the face of the global economic crisis. Saint Laurent’s lifelong partner, Pierre Berge, said that most of the profits from the auction would be donated to HIV/AIDS research.

The overwhelming interest in last month’s auction underscores the impact of Saint Laurent in the art and design world over the last five decades. Born in Algeria in 1936, Saint Laurent maintained a home in Morocco. At his request, Saint Laurent’s ashes were scattered near his Marrakech villa in the Majorelle botantical garden, which he frequently visited to find influence. His influence also came from the streets of major international cities. For example, he was known for “bringing the Parisian beatnik style to couture runways and adapting peacoats he found in Army-Navy stores in New York” into fashionable women’s jackets, according to the New York Times.

Corporate executives and managers could learn from the man who built the House of YSL. To succeed in business, you must change as rapidly as the markets and interests of customers change. Today’s haute couture can be tomorrow’s bargain-bin special. Same goes with your products and services, and how you do business.

Seek inspiration in both likely and unlikely places. Embrace the principle that the look and feel of a product is as important as its function. Leverage the latest Web 2.0 tools that your customers and clients are using. And those who are fortunate enough to have laurels, shouldn’t rest on them, not if your business is interested in being around tomorrow.