The meaning is in the content of the text and not in the typeface, and that is why we loved Helvetica very much.
Certain kinds of typeface design and typographic design are designed to persuade: we can make this company look modern if we use a crisp sans serif typeface, or we can make this restaurant look like its been around forever if we use typefaces and layout styles that have been around forever too. But there are other categories, and ballot design is one of them, where the goal should be to be purely functional. There have been notable failures in this category.
If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.
It's a cliché, but typefaces are really just ingredients.
Anyone who uses Helvetica knows nothing about typefaces.
Type is saying things to us all the time. Typefaces express a mood, an atmosphere. They give words a certain coloring.
A great typeface is not a collection of beautiful letters, but a beautiful collection of letters.
All typefaces are historical.
