Why some brands break out fresh fonts—while others revert to type

Helvetica, the famous sans-serif font, starred in its own 2007 Gary Hustwit documentary. In 2016, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art rebranded with a custom lettering design that set internet critics howling. And lest we forget, Gap had those five minutes in which it dared abandon its stately, elongated all-caps lettering for a ham-fisted arrangement of title-case bold type and a tiny blue square. Which is all to say that typefaces, while they may not be immediately discernible to the c