“[T]he business of printed lettering has, under the spur of commercial competition, got altogether out of hand and gone mad. There are now about as many different varieties of letters as there are different kinds of fools. I myself am responsible for designing five different sorts of sans-serif letters—each one thicker and fatter than the last because every advertisement has to try and shout down its neighbors.”

—Eric Gill, An Essay On Typography, 1936.