I most definitely appreciate the Co-op night banners! It seems like we have a small community of devoted font-aficionados here at DBO.

You wish to understand the possible multitude of reasons why Helvetica may have been chosen I suggest you watch this.

Yeah… still never gotten around to watching that one yet! :) I saw Gary Hustwit's follow-up Objectified a couple of years later when it was shown at SXSW, also worth watching.

Is this the same one as the one on NETFLIX?

My wife, the graphic designer in the family, made me watch with her. It made me really appreciate design, fonts, and all the work that goes behind.

My wife is awesome.

I'm not going to deny that Helvetica's a fantastic font with a very rich history, but in some cases it feels very over played, especially in this design era of minimalism. I really like Armin Vit's brief rant about Helvetica entitled "Why I hate Helvetica," but I'm not as strongly opinionated about it.

Why I hate Helvetica
As it concerns identity design we all recognize Helvetica as a bastion of the rise of the practice of corporate identity in the 1960s, deployed with unrelenting passion by the likes of Massimo Vignelli and Unimark in the U.S. and Total Design in Europe. It helped shed decorative logos and present a unified front for corporations of all sizes in the most serious of manners. It was, in a way, a unifying technology of the era, establishing a specific standard for how logos should look. And that’s my biggest issue with Helvetica: It’s 1960s technology, 1960s aesthetics, 1960s principles. You know what else is technology from the 1960s? Rotary-dial telephones. The BASIC computer language. Things we’ve built on for the past 50 years and stopped using as the new, more functional, more era-appropriate products took hold. Today there are dozens of contemporary sans serif typefaces that improve the performance and aesthetics of Helvetica but yet some designers still hold on to it as if it were the ultimate typeface. It’s not. Just because it’s been glorified in a similar way as the suits and clothing in Mad Men doesn’t mean it’s still the right choice. You don’t see people today dressed like Don Draper or Lane Pryce — the business-person equivalents of a business typeface — because fashion has changed, attitudes have changed, the world has changed. But, like cockroaches, Helvetica seems to be poised to survive time and space, no matter what. When you see someone walking down the street, today, dressed like a 1960s business person, you (or at least I) think “what a douche.” That’s the same thought I have when I see something/someone using Helvetica.

The main argument of using Helvetica is that it’s “neutral.” That is absolute bullshit. There is nothing neutral about Helvetica. Choosing Helvetica has as much meaning and carries as many connotations as choosing any other typeface. It has as many visual quirks as any other typeface it was meant to shun for needless decoration. Helvetica is the fixed-gear bike of typefaces: it’s as basic as it gets, but the statement it makes is as complex as anything else. Standing for independence and going against the grain, supposedly not caring about what others think or of being duped for the upgrades and improvements that “the man” forces upon us. Helvetica is old. Helvetica is clunky. No business, service, or product deserves Helvetica in the twenty-first century more than anyone deserves to sit in a dentist chair in the 1960s.

Am I wrong? Probably. Do you disagree? Probably. Do I care? No, as long as you don’t use Helvetica.

The screenshot I made used Roboto 2.0. There are definitely similarities, but look closely at the lowercase s — the top and tail of it have horizontal cut-offs, whereas in the original in the screenshot they're vertical (more like Helvetica than a humanist sans serif, such as Open Sans):

Maybe somebody from Bungie can drop in and settle it for us :)

I can see where you're coming from, I think it may arise from not having info on all the revisions they've made. If it isn't roboto then I'll have to dig further. The uppercase "R" is quite distinct and besides Helvetica I can't think of another font that has that. Should have pointed out that on Open Sans you're absolutely correct, I was just throwing that out because it's used on the website.

Under our noses the whole time. Neue Haas Grotesk.

Edit: IMG.

I do? I'm afraid I've been misunderstood. I've been pretty fascinated with typography since long before there was a wikipedia.

I'm guessing I have misunderstood you, then. But regarding:

Yeah, I imagine it's pretty difficult to thread the needle between interesting and readable during a firefight.

I'd argue that it's not difficult to find a good typeface that's both interesting and readable; there are loads of choices (arguably too many), to cover a whole spectrum of aesthetics and vibes.

But there's one potential requirement not discussed in this thread yet: internationalisation. When you're trying to deliver a product in as many languages as possible, you're going to hit up against this problem. One thing that Helvetica (and a lot of its ilk) has going for it is the availability of all the necessary glyphs to represent foreign languages, so I have to imagine this was a factor in the decision.

I hadn't come across Epoca Pro before and it was the uppercase "R", among others, that was steering me (incorrectly) towards Roboto. It was an assumption based off the use of said face on Bnet, too hasty in retrospect but along the right lines in terms of it's utility. You live and learn. Great discussion all the same, it's what drew me here in the first place. Many thanks.