Some thoughts from watching Helvetica, a documentary just about the Helvetica font:

• Helvetica is everywhere.
• Fonts are more than a mere messenger. Sure, nothing new there.  That Helvetica can carry so many different meanings from so many companies/governments/artists is impressive.
• This guy summed up the differing views of Helvetica in one quote better than I can: “The clean, cool look of modernism or the sleek, sinister accomplice of hegemonic globalization?”
• Using Helvetica to fast-track your company’s brand association with modernism seems like a good call at first … but if you tie your core logo to Helvetica completely, your brand is effectively at the whim of (admittedly slow-changing) fickle stereotypes.  Example: What happens to American Apparel when Helvetica loses the association that they originally latched onto?  Erik Spiekermann makes the case that the Marlboro brand owns the distinctive font they use … and it seems like company brands using Helvetica are more-or-less owned by the font.
  Update: I just noticed that American Apparel’s new product uses a distinctive font. A handful of their recent ads use it … maybe they’re changing?
• The post-modern (Helvetica is modernism) font movement towards David-Carson-eqsue/difficult-to-read/handwritten/hand-drawn/expressive/loaded fonts has generally seemed not-very-useful to me … but Stefan Sagmeister said something that made the movement make a little more sense: (paraphrasing in my own words) ’Sometimes having a font that is hard to read - that takes some time to read - can convey the same about the underlying content.  For example, an album thats takes a few listens … or art that needs to be studied to comprehand … using a difficult-to-read font lets the reader know that they will need to invest time to understand the content, too.’  I’m not saying I’ll find a place to use illegible fonts, but I can see some of the reasoning.

As a final thought: Helvetica made me curious about typography for Chinese and other glyph-based (non alphabet) languages.  Did/do those written languages experience modernism/post-modernism in a similar way?  As someone with near-zero knowledge of Asian languages, I’m going to need to build a bit of a foundation before I can really understand the answer to my question.

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