The Face of Uniformity
http://shinntype.com/Stories/Uniformity.pdf

Shinn, Nick
ShinnType
2003

Abstract:

Helvetica is back, bigtime. On the street, it’s in campaigns for companies as different as IBM and The Gap. At the online font retailers, it tops the sales charts. In the metaculture, Getty Images uses it to express control of the visual world. It’s quite shocking to look at the font sales charts, and realize that the serif genre has dropped off the map. But you know this already, because whenever you try a serif font in a layout it doesn’t look right — too oldfashioned. But perhaps that’s the wrong term, because the sans faces ruling the roost today are anything but contemporary, mostly dating from the mid-20th century, many from a lot earlier.