My brother and sister-in-law gave Aitch a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey for Christmas (five sizes too big! So he can wear it to school every day for the next five years! Thanks, guys!), and he has consequently become a Steelers fan. We caught a few minutes of the game last night, and I was struck by the awesome typeface used for the numbers and text on the players’ uniforms. (You’d think I would have noticed the past 20 times that Aitch has worn the jersey since Christmas day, but it’s more striking when you see the whole team arrayed on the field.) It’s Futura Condensed, one of the few sans-serif fonts in the NFL, kind of old-fashioned and edgy at the same time, with italics giving an added kick. Go Steelers!

Not surprisingly, there is more than one person on the Internets who cares about such things.

Some time later I changed channels and lit on a PBS program in which they were discussing typefaces. One talking head after another proceeded to savage Helvetica: So boring! So predictable! So mainstream! So unadventurous! I was tired and drifted in and out of consciousness, but every time I picked up the thread they were STILL dissing Helvetica. Those people ripped Helvetica a new one. They beat up Helvetica and took its lunch money. They accused Helvetica of lobbing rockets into Israel AND committing atrocities in Gaza. I was waiting for them to shower a little opprobrium on Comic Sans MS, which I personally consider responsible for most of the evils PowerPoint has unleashed upon the world, but no. It was All Helvetica, All the Time.

Today I googled “PBS, typeface, Helvetica” to see what kind of program I had been watching, and saw that indeed it was a documentary devoted entirely to Helvetica. And people make fun of public television!

Thus ends our tale of two typefaces.