I’ve always liked Helvetica, and now the ubiquitous font now is coming to a theater (or film festival, or museum) near you.

Despite of the plethora of fonts available, there’s something reliable and solid about this strong, easy-to-read and instantly recognizable font. I think that, sometimes, the message of the design gets lost in the medium and is not clearly conveyed because it’s just “over-designed”. Most times, simplicity is the key to communication, and the readability depends on the reader’s familiarity with the typeface. A classic, sans serif face like Helvetica is always a winner (Franklin Gothic is a close second for me).

A little history on Helvetica:

Helvetica was created by Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas’sche Schriftgießerei (Haas type foundry) of Münchenstein, Switzerland…[O]riginally called Neue Haas Grotesk, the typeface’s name was changed by Haas’ German parent company Stempel in 1960 to Helvetica — derived from Confederatio Helvetica, the Latin name for Switzerland — in order to make it more marketable internationally.

Helvetica is among the most widely used sans-serif typefaces internationally. Versions exist for the Roman, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Greek alphabets. Unicode character sets include special characters and accents for Hindi, Urdu, Khmer, and Vietnamese. Variants of character-based writing systems including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have been developed to complement Helvetica.

Helvetica is widely used commercially. Companies and products including American Airlines, American Apparel, Energizer batteries, Greyhound Lines, Lufthansa, National Car Rental, and Toyota use it in their wordmarks.