Helvetica neutral?

[Keely Hope]

Great answers I wish I had them a few months back

[zumojuice]

1. Which 3 words would you use to describe Helvetica? Clean, Open, Over-Used

2. Do you have any emotional response to Helvetica and its uses?
It is probably one of the best and most seen fonts. I really like it, and the whole swiss design movement that it and its fellows are a part of. It is has instant quality to projects, but I am selective of its usage in my work, as it has been used to commonly. Fonts inherit everything they are used on (ie blackletter fonts with the nazis, not used by rappers) so with some many people using it, you have to be clever to get the same level of individuality with it

3. In your opinion, is Helvetica ‘neutral’?

If used right, it can give the feeling of neutrality, but as a designer, I know the truth runs far deeper.

[Cwilk]

Helvetica is actually my favorite font. Unfortunately though I seem to have the most problems with it.

Sometimes Helvetica can be neutral, but not always.

[zumojuice]

what problems do you have with it?

[Cwilk]

For some reason, certain Helvetica font sets work great and then I'll turn on my computer the same as I always have and the font isn't available. Like yesterday...I opened a file that uses Helvetica (BM) and it tells me it can't find it and shows the font in Pink. Well the font hightlighted in pink looks just fine, but it says the font is missing when I go to make a PDF or package my file, so I replace it with another Helvetica font set that's similar....and guess what.....that font goes missing too and all of a sudden the (BM) one is usable.

Go figure.

[zumojuice]

mmmmmm sounds like you have a dodgy version there.

[Cwilk]

Yeah I'm not sure how to fix, but Helvetica is my favorite font for certain design things. And my husband is screaming at his fonts right now. For some reason he went from having 1700 fonts to only having 36. His problem started with Arial Narrow.

Sounds like it's going to be a fun day.

[zumojuice]

apparently, 30 fonts is all a designer needs. I think thats 30 particular ones, not selected by your dying mac. If you have a lot of fonts, font book might be a bit crap and you'll want to suitcase so you can turn them on and off easily without it wiping them.

[Toon]

Font Book works fine with Leopard, it was Tiger that had all the errors, I've got 2989 fonts running and everything works great

[zumojuice]

yeah I heard it was better these days. though is that all at the same time? or just the most common ones running?