Helvetica Equals Easy

A fellow Photoshop user and friend of mine recently asked me to provide some feedback on a design she had been working on. So I did. Just a little, but enough to get a reaction...

My main concern was her choice of font. The selected font was boring. Given that there are thousands and thousands of fonts in the world, I thought she might want to take a look at some others. Reporting back to her, I commented that she had used plain Helvetica, a sure sign of an amateur designer. Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the best way to phrase it, but to prove my point I did send her a link to a short blog post about 13 design mistakes most beginners make… the first one on the list being “Don’t use Helvetica!”

It didn’t end there, though. Saying what I truly thought wasn’t to be my only mistake! In her reply email, she retorted that she had not actually used Helvetica; she had used Impact. Fair enough: Impact is not Helvetica. But in my defense, Impact too is a very common font, and one that is installed on most systems. It’s very commonly used in everyday PowerPoint presentations and jazzed-up Word documents with most Photoshop beginners using Impact simply because it’s handy. Hey, it looks interesting and it’s included in your system. Done. Impact is basically just the beginner Photoshop user’s Helvetica.

My friend then went on to point out that Helvetica Neue is, in fact, a very popular font and has received a lot of rave reviews. Now, I too am a big fan of Helvetica Neue, but in my initial comments I was referring specifically to the plain old vanilla Helvetica that comes pre-installed on all computer systems.

And so on and on it went. It was unfortunate that what was meant to be a design discussion had to turn into a semantics issue. The truth of the matter, however, is that any of the fonts commonly found on most systems – be it Helvetica, Impact or Comic Sans – are fonts that should really, for the most part, be avoided. The reason being that these fonts represent the mainstream: these are the fonts that everybody sees every day. The upshot of this being that the use of such fonts will do nothing to make your design stand out from the crowd.

As previously mentioned, there are literally thousands and thousands of fonts to choose from. It therefore seems lazy or shortsighted for anyone to use only the fonts available to them on their system. What’s more, thousands of the thousands and thousands of fonts available are free! There really is no excuse to use the default font on your system, unless you just aren’t interested in doing anything beyond the norm.

Isn’t being creative about not being normal and not being average? Of course, being creative, and better than ‘normal’ also means doing a little bit of work. Yes, it does take some work to use a font other than a system default font. You have to actually go out and look for it. You have to find one you like; one that matches the style of the design you’re envisioning. You then have to install it on your system. And then you may even have to reset your type if you have it already set in some standard font that was originally on your system. All of this takes work. But, and this is a big but, a but that is worth it, all of this equals creativity.

If you want to be creative, then you need to put in the work. You need to put in the thought. You need to put in the effort.

Of course, this discussion begs these questions: does any of this actually matter? Is this an issue? Do fonts really make a difference? Do they even interest you at all? Does unique design interest you? Does being creative interest you? Is my take on creativity correct?

Please let me know your thoughts. I’d like to know why you are, or are not, using the system fonts installed on your computer; why you are or are not just living in that limited box where only Helvetica, Impact, Times and, even worse, Arial live. I really would like to read your comments.

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Keywords: fonts, Helvetica, Impact, design, creative, creativity

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