The underlying question the interviewees all seem to discuss is whether typefaces convey information. Some take the position that Helvetica is a “crystal goblet” that is, itself, totally neutral, and serves only to illustrate the form of the contents — a medium without message. Others take the opposite view, like the Sagmeister, who says that through its corporate overuse it has been assigned a message: “what you are reading is boring.”

David Carson, who is also interviewed, talks about how he thinks type should correspond to content, discusses his famous decision to typeset a poorly-written music review in Dingbats, and says that Helvetica doesn’t really say anything. He essentially agrees with the Sagmeister that it’s appropriate for boring things like “Greyhound” but inappropriate for words like “caffeinated” and “extramarital”.

Still others take the position that you have to use outside concepts discuss type (“it needs to be more Bach, less Beethoven. More oxford, less brogue”), and so Helvetica necessarily creates a dialectic with the elements around it, and meanings arise from that. One designer takes this quite far and floats the theory that the font contains a Swiss design program — that the typeface has a kind of built-in intelligence — that using Helvetica necessarily influences your other design decisions.

Throughout, all of the designers eventually succumb. They admit that Helvetica is, at least, extremely prevalent. You either use it or react against it, which is still a manifestation of its influence. It’s described as “air”, “the end of a line of thought in sans-serif type design”, “unimprovable”, “evil”, and “my native language.”