Is it me or are typeface designers some of the most pretentious people in tech? And that's a really high bar.
I think they’re just doing what is smart, talking about what they contribute and what their craft is, because underlying it all, the truth is they design for legal reasons, because you can only trademark your brand that is a word, which you want to license for merchandising to sell to the mindless sports masses, if you also own the typeface. You can’t really trademark or copyright Arsenal the word written in Times New Roman.
Font people, logo designers and sushi makers.
Documentary films are like nonfiction books: any subject can be fascinating when done well, any subject can be awful and banal when done poorly. I’m not even a huge non-fiction / documentary fan but I’ll die on the hill that telling true stories with depth and passion is much harder than doing great fiction.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi was a beautiful documentary as well, but clearly sushi was being put on some divine pedestal. That is the 'over-the-top' part I am referring to.
Both Helvetica and Jiro Dreams of Sushi are trying to communicate, to you, the passion that these other people feel for the work they do.
They're not telling you that you should care that much about fonts or sushi. There is no claim if divinity. They're honestly trying to give you a 90 minute glimpse of the interior life of other people.
There are other documentaries that are much more neutral or even dismissive of their subjects, if that's more your taste. Hospital and City Hall are great examples with no editorial cast. Riligulous and Roger & Me are great examples of a documentarian trying hard to have no empathy.
Surely the design aims, the evolution of the typeface and how it meets those aims are more important.
I do have good vision but for me (sample size 1) it’s really hard to read (especially the riband variant). How does it look for people in different environments ?. Is the aim to look iconic rather than communicate information.
I wish Arsenal well as my father was huge fan and would always look for the results.
(Not least on the basis that they changed the requirements of paper, which before typefaces was a rather more ad-hoc, per-project process)