Turn of the Screw, Henry James
The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Thérèse Raquin, Émile Zola
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky

Penguin teamed up with AIDS awareness (RED) and a team of designers. Each designer used a quote from the book in the cover design. If you like words and typography, you’ll like them. My favourites are Anna Karenina and The Secret Agent. Notes from the Underground is also pretty intense. Yours?

Hat tip to Sarah Turner

Can’t say the test is accurate—first time I took it my answers linked me to Architype Van Doesburg.

I think it’s awful. According to the site, this font expresses “strength of form and firmness of purpose.” It’s a “brutally fair” typeface, in which every letter occupies equal space. Apparently I would “wrestle anyone who claims C is less important than D.” Hmm, I am a bit strong, I admit that, but brutal? Would I wrestle someone over a typeface? Certainly not this one.

Try it yourself and let me know what type you are: www.pentagram.com/what-type-are-you

Why is Helvetica’s birthday a reason to celebrate? For one thing, Helvetica is one of the great typographical success stories. It was created in 1957 by by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. It was originally called Die Neue Haas Grotesk but was renamed Helvetica in 1961 (after the Latin word for Switzerland: Helvetia) to make it more marketable internationally.

The design community loved it—it was legible and modern. Until Helvetica, designers were working with typefaces inherited from the 19th century, which had a manual, handmade feel. Helvetica, with its sleek lines, looks machine made. It has a neutral tone—any meaning it conveys is purely in the text. Helvetica is simply “there.”

Helvetica became the typeface of corporate identity in the ‘60s and ‘70s. There was a period when designers rebelled against it, because it represented the establishment and conformity, but it’s back now and being used by cheeky brands (American Apparel) cool brands (Comme des Garcons) and mass market brands (The Gap).

Notice what the following wordmarks have in common: Each one uses Helvetica.

And this just scratches the surface—Helvetica is used in more than 40 logos. It’s the official typeface of the Canadian government, it’s used in forms created by the IRS and in public transit signage. Look at the typefaces around you and you’ll begin to see it everywhere.

Why is Helvetica such a success? Its most enthusiastic proponents perceive in its design a sense of inevitability, as if it were not so much invented as discovered. “It’s hard to see how to improve Helvetica,” says Matthew Carter, designer of Microsoft’s Verdana and Georgia typefaces. “It just seems exactly right.”

Designers say it achieves a nearly perfect balance between figure and ground, giving it a feeling of solidity. As well, it’s got a roundness that is human and comforting. Helvetica’s message is this: you are going to get to your destination on time; your plane will not crash; your money is safe in our vault; we will not break the package; the paperwork has been filled in; everything is going to be OK.

Ultimately, Helvetica is a blank slate, a cipher—and this is the key to its success. It can be authoritative or ironic, sober or idealistic, corporate or cozy. Throughout Hustwit’s film, the commentators reach for similes to characterize Helvetica’s presence everywhere in today’s visual landscape. They compare it to air, gravity, and perfume—it’s woven into the environment.

I recommend Helvetica—the font and the movie. If you’re interested in design you will also enjoy Hustwit’s latest film, Objectified, which furthers his interest in design, this time industrial design. I had a chance to see it last year at the Hot Docs festival. It was also a hot ticket, and a great film.

Remember the site is for college students, so some of the previews you might see are, um, inappropriate. Unless you happen to live with college-age students, in which case you’re probably immune.

1. Font Conference is a meeting of personified type faces (French Script wears a beret and has a heavy accent, Comic Sans wears a cape and gets to save the day—you get the picture).
2. Font Fight depicts a battle between two gangs, one led by Helvetica, and one by her clone, Arial. A little violent, and again, Comic Sans gets the last line.

Still, we’re not recommending you actually use Comic Sans.

It was created in 1994 by Microsoft in-house font designer Vincent Connare, who was appalled to see Times New Roman being used in cartoon speech bubbles. Turning to comic books for inspiration, he created Comic Sans. Although it was specifically designed for instructional software and programs aimed at children, it somehow got bundled into Windows 95 as one of the system fonts. From there, its popularity took off. And its popularity continues to grow so quickly, that it threatens to overtake Helvetica and Times New Roman by 2013.

This enrages Holly and Dave Combs, who started Ban Comic Sans, an international movement with this mission:

While we recognize the font may be appropriate in a few specific instances, our position is that the only effective means of ending this epidemic of abuse is to completely ban Comic Sans.

If you start to look, you’ll see Comic Sans everywhere. Love it or hate it, the main thing is to know enough about typography to understand why you should probably avoid it.

Type is a voice, and the type you choose is the tone of that voice. Ideally, it supports your message by being transparent, invisible. It’s the same with the best writing—the style serves the purpose and never draws attention to itself, never distracts the reader from the message.

Imagine a Danger: Do Not Enter sign. It’s probably in Arial Black, which would add authority. Appropriate, right? Imagine a legal document in Times New Roman—just the right amount of serious. Imagine a wedding invitation in a script—it’s elegant, formal, romantic. Now imagine any of these documents in Comic Sans. Ridiculous, right? And see what the American dollar bill looks like in Comic Sans. It’s just wrong.

Okay, comic sans does have appropriate uses, such as in comic book design, or in a sixth grader’s essay. It’s been used on Beanie Babies since the late 1990s. And that seems right. But does it belong on building signs? Or on information sheets for people with cancer? On legal documents?

Does it belong in business writing? No way. Its tone is childish, silly and friendly to the point of annoying. Definitely not professional. It says “Don’t take me seriously.”