Helvetica: heart it or hate it?
Can you spell boring?
I love type and typography. And I’ve been fortunate to have had several jobs that involved working with type, thus allowing me to pour over font catalogs, spend someone else’s money to amass a good-sized library of Adobe fonts, and fool around in Adobe Illustrator and Quark Xpress until my eyes glazed over. I even did a bit of freelance graphic design.
he who dies with the most fonts wins
I know there are numerous variations of this slogan, but this is the one that seems truest to me. So of course when I came across the video animation below of the history of typography, it was love at first sight.
People’s type tastes vary. Some people don’t even pay any attention to type. They can’t distinguish Bodoni from Bookman. If they use a Word Processing program, they just go with the default font.
Which brings me to the over-used default font of choice in the Western world: Helvetica. There are only two fonts I roundly despise, and the other one is Courier which I once removed from every single PC in the office where I was working (because someone actually went out of his way to use it; obviously, he had to be stopped).
There’s a wealth of sans serif fonts in the universe, including Univers, all of which are preferable to the dreadful Helvetica. I hate Helvitica. If you heart Helvetica, well, I’m sorry but we just can’t be friends anymore.
Related articles
give me a daisy 