Response to the movie Helvetica

Yesterday, during class, we watched most of the movie Helvetica. According to IMDb.com, it's a documentary film about typography, graphic design, and visual objects in general. What was interesting to me was the range of responses to the birth of Helvetica. It seems like every business seemed to use it when it first arrived to give them a "fresh" look, and I believe they still continue to do so today. But one thing that stood out at me was the woman, I forget her name, who associated Helvetica with starting the Iraq war. I think she was joking, but it still seems odd that someone would make a joke like that. 

As a fan of typography myself, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. I had never seen it before. During the movie, it struck me how many different places use Helvetica or some other san-sarif font today in logos, menus, papers, movie posters, etc., among other things. It leads me to wonder if there will come a time where serif fonts will become obsolete? What do you think about that? I believe that because of its clean look (Helvetica, et. al.), it appeals to the eye, and I think that's why Helvetica and fonts like it have become so popular nowadays. 

It's interesting to relate this trend to the use of typographic design today, especially with things such as Wordle, where a lot of the word bubbles are created in san-serif fonts. Furthermore, unless the type is already a part of a masthead in newspapers or magazines, it seems the trend for headlines and sell lines seems to be gravitating towards san-sarif fonts, or serif fonts that look very similar to san-serif fonts. I think that is the case because it's clean look is easily readable from far away, even when in a smaller size. Newseum's Today's Front Pages gallery helps show this trend in the newspaper industry. Many of the main headlines from the over 700 front pages on this site are san-serif fonts. Do you think that trend will continue?