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Yes. Like every other designer I went to see Helvetica, Gary Hustwit’s documentary on the titular typeface featuring a Who’s Who of designers who, in one way or another were and are linked with the typeface.

The interesting parts, for me, was to see each designer interviewed talk about the impact Helvetica had on them - going from unadulterated praise (Vignelli), to lametation (Spiekerman) - and I couldn’t help but think about my own experiences with the iconic typeface.

I consider myself firmly in the Modernist school of thought. I don’t think you need a million typefaces, I like structure, and if something isn’t neccessary I don’t use it. Yes, I love Helvetica for all those things… but personally, I’m more of an Akzidenz Grotesk man.

Wasn’t always the case though.

Back in art college our tutors forbade us using Helvetica and Times in our designs. At the time we thought it was a bit weird, but thinking about it now I can see why. In school we had a very limited amount of typefaces to choose from, especially in our junior years. We had the faces mentioned above, accompanied by Officina Sans, Gill Sans, Bembo, Palatino, Futura and a few more which I have forgotten. The list was completed by the fonts pre-installed on the Macs: OCR-A, Monaco, Eurostile and what have you. Helvetica was clearly the best looking, most versatile typeface in the list - so why outlaw it? It hit me when I heard Spiekerman’s argument against Helvetica: because it’s everywhere. It comes with the computer, ready to use without consideration. I now think our teachers wanted us to think further than the standard list: ban the obvious choices and force us to look further. Which was fine by us. We… I wanted to be different, I didn’t want to use Helvetica - everyone else used it, so why bother. So we went out of our way to avoid it. Use Eurostile or Futura instead.

The big change came in my last year in college when my friend and I unearthed a stack of Fuse Fonts discs, that were only supposed to be used as (theoretical) examples of typedesign. Screw that! This was our chance to be different. That, coupled with our discovery of David Carson meant that all rules were out (much to the chagrin of our teachers of course): unreadable fonts in cluttered (but look how cool it looks!) designs. Around the same time I properly discovered Photoshop and I used every single filter at my disposal, often maxing out on the 99 layer limit. I wasn’t interested in classic design or Modernist approach. It had to be hectic, full of useless details and filtered into oblivion. Less is more didn’t apply to me.

During those years I had numerous discussions and arguments with my dad, who as an interior designer trained in the 60s was steeped in Modernist theory. He had endless books and catalogues on design (Knoll catalogues for example - designed by Massimo Vignelli), books on the Bauhaus movement, and told me about people like El Lissitzky and Mies Van Der Rohe - which usually fell on deaf ears.

It wasn’t until I came to London that I (re?)discovered Modernism, Muller-Brockmann, and the Swiss Style properly - things that were never covered in college. In London I felt very much wet behind the ears, I didn’t have my own creative voice. Reading about Muller-Brockmann and friends I felt a familiarity with their approach to design, and echoes of my dad, and finally saw that, for me at least, they were right. So my design work started to change: out with all the clutter, in with structure and consideration, and everything fell right into place.

So whats the point of this little story? I’m not sure - other than by seeing the documentary I remembered how much I changed, and hopefully evolved as a designer over the past 10 years. And that I prefer Akzidenz Grotesk over Helvetica - because everyone else uses it.

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