Well, Helvetica's been old-fashioned for well over 20 years, so it's not suprising that folks would have been over it for that long a time.

I remember watching the documentary of the same name, and wondering how everyone could be so fond of what's ultimately a very plain font. Now, Garamond or Bookman — those are fonts! All just a matter of taste, of course.

It's all context, isn't it? Helvetica's use in graphic arts back in the 60s bordered on the sublime, and for that reason has become a foundation stone upon which everything thereafter was built and refers to. It's hard to escape from.

I just wish I could peek inside the head of someone in the previous century, witnessing the birth of sans serifs such Akzidenz Grotesk - THAT must have been Earth shaking.

And I'm with you on Garamond - I have an entire side project's brand built around it. We outsourced the second iteration of its website (because Shopify is a bit of a dog to dev for on Windows... for me anyway) and the person we outsourced to thought it best to strip out our entire brand language and replace with whatever rounded sans (replete with flat colour scheme) was doing the web fashion rounds of two years ago. We're still putting the pieces back to this day! :)

That sort of thing's my marker of a poor 'designer' — someone who has no concept of how to work with what they're given, instead needing to start from scratch. In that vein, if you can't work to other's rules, you're just a decorator.