The last refuge of the chancer

The BBC (on ONE at least) have gone all Helvetica, which, I can't tell you, fills me to the brim with rage.

The "I hate Helvetica" site says it all: it's not that it's inherently ugly, but it is so overused. Not only overused, but always used in exactly the same way. (Of course it's not beyond notice that the site also commits a grammatical sin with an apostrophe error and the incorrect use of "there computers" - NOT as in, "them there computers," unless that is what they meant.)

When a designer uses Helvetica, especially in the cliched way currently in use on the Beeb, it's an admission of total incompetency. It's a sign that someone is absolutely bereft of creativity, a stranger to originality. There are millions upon millions of typefaces in the known universe, many of them attractive, recent, the product of hours of painstaking work. And yet the inspiration-free blagger designer, the chancer with a fictional CV and a bootleg copy of Photoshop, is just to damn lazy to live a little, to learn a little, to make some kind of effort.

Whoever did this, I say, deserves a good slapping. The BBC have moved from corporate redesign evoking 1930s public utility (the Gill Sans thing) to an empty cliche evoking 1950s... er... Swiss public utility. Give them a few years and they'll go all psychedelic on us - except they already tried that with BBC3.