Remember Bruno Maag, the type designer who claimed that he hated Helvetica so much that he wanted to wipe it off the Earth with his font, Aktiv Grotesk?

Here’s a blow-by-blow analysis of all the places where he shows himself to be under-informed, over-zealous, or just an idiot.

Let’s cut to the chase:

What galled me most in the movie [Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica] was when Massimo Vignelli said that Helvetica was a Modernist typeface —- No! No! Helvetica is anything but Modernist, Clearly it has its roots in Akzidenz Grotesk and that was designed in 1899, [sic] ¹ which is Victorian as far as I am concerned. Akzidenz is a fantastic font but it’s not Modernist, it’s got a really antique feel about it, which again shows that Max Miedinger [Helvetica’s designer] didn’t have a clue about type design. He was the salesman at [foundry] Haas’sche Schriftgießerei for Christ’s sake.

If you’re saying that Univers is a better font because it is modernist (which seems to me to be what Maag is implying), then for god’s sakes don’t read the Univers Wikipedia article, which explicitly says that Helvetica and Univer are “sometimes confused with each other, because each is based on the 1896 typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk.” So Univers is better, because it is ‘more modernist’ than a font which “has its roots in Akzidenz Grotesk, […] which is Victorian, [… and has …] a really antique feel about it.”

I’ve seen [Helvetica] in books. It has no place there, it has no place in body copy, it is not a hardcore reading font. Being a grotesk font, inherently, it is not very legible. Going back to Vignelli and using it on the New York Subway —- that goes against every principle of legibiltiy. [sic] For signage you want to have something condensed so that you can have a higher letter count and you want to have character forms that are not ambiguous. Some of the character forms in Helvetica are very ambiguous because they are so uniform.

Let’s look at the Helvetica Wikipedia article. It says, “The aim of the new design was to create a neutral typeface that had great clarity, no intrinsic meaning in its form, and could be used on a wide variety of signage,” with a cite-note mark referencing the film Helvetica. So while it might not be the most reliable or neutral source in this case, (though Wikipedia of course aims for a neutral point of view) the gist of it as an independent source is clear—what Maag is saying is bullshit.

And if condensed typefaces are so excellent for signage, why do none of the world’s road signs use them? (If readers know of any signs that do use condensed fonts, please let me know) This is an area where legibility is even more important than with subway signs—a driver might only see a road sign for a single second before driving past it. Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, who were commissioned to design new road signs for Britain in 1963, performed perhaps the most in-depth study into signage typography ever made, and created Transport, which is still seen on British road signs today. Guess what—Transport isn’t a condensed font. Condensed fonts hinder legibility, in fact, because they distort the letter-forms and reduce the familiarity the eye has with the alphabet it is reading. (as for the ambiguousness of the uniformity of Helvetica’s letterforms, though—OK, that may be)

And if, as according to Maag, it’s not good for signs, and it’s not good for books either—what is it good for, exactly? If you’re arguing that the problem is inappropriate use, at least have the decency to point out cases in which Helvetica is appropriate.

You don’t have to have 5000 fonts on your machine but you use the one that speaks in the right voice, that conveys the right functionality for the job.

And Helvetica has the right functionality for most of its uses² because it is neutral, clean, and (despite what you think, Maag) modern.

(And of course everyone should use Aktiv Grotesk mindlessly instead of using Helvetica mindlessly.)

The rest of what Maag says is marketing for Aktiv Grotesk, his ‘Helvetica killer’ which a) revels in being a rip-off of both Helvetica and Univers, and b) doesn’t looks as good as either of them.

So, I can’t wait to see companies lining up to rebrand with Aktiv Grotesk. I bet Marks & Spencer will jump right on board.