Helvetica

Helvetica, the new documentary by Gary Hustwit, is all about the life of a particular typeface we are all very familiar with. The documentary provides some interesting history on the font and how it found its way to our commercial and material lifestyles, how it became the type that surrounds us everyday. The views of different designers is very interesting. Some uphold Helvetica to be a great invention and a revolution in commercial design and brand recognition. On the other hand, some designers find it to be the death of all other typefaces. Helvetica pushes them to the shadows and it's up to these type designers to bring back to life some variety of type in our lives. It is a very fine line Helvetica walks. It's cool and intriguing to have one universal font that translates through cultures and generations. But at the same time it diminishes the unique qualities of those same cultures. So is being culturally ambiguous a bad thing?