Helvetica

Though I felt like an absolute dork while doing so, I enjoyed watching the movie Helvetica. Being an English major that has a heavy sense of design (I've been working on some sort of school publication since I was a sophomore in high school) and I thought I was strange for noticing the peculiarities of fonts. I absolutely hate papyrus, as I think anyone that ever wanted a default "asian-looking" font resorts to that. Ironically, I always hated Arial for bulk-text as well; it was ironic then, to discover that Arial was just window's version of Helvetica.

I found it odd how everyone gushed about how amazing the font was; yes, I agree that Helvetica is very nice and neat, but by the same token I feel as if the font lacks any sort of emotion...at all. You cannot call it professional looking, whimsical, curly, bubbly, exciting or any sort of other defining word. It is simply...there. That's why I agree that Helvetica is good to have in places such as stop signs or trash can bins. You don't need Edwardian Script to say "Stop" or "Place trash here." Overall, however, I enjoy a bit of life and design within my fonts, and I think that a font should describe what you are selling. If you are to be whimsical, shouldn't your title (name AND font) describe that? There is such versatility to font faces, it seems a shame to focus so heavily on one. If you notice, my blog is not written in Arial/Helvetica. I feel like those fonts say nothing about me.