The trailer for British film-maker/writer/academic Patrick Keiller’s eagerly-awaited third installment of his cinematic essays on the political, cultural and urban decline of Great Britain, Robinson in Ruins, inadvertently offers a succinct and astute critique of contemporary typography. A classic Keiller motif, the straight shot of a British motorway sign, cuts in an ever-tightening zoom to a lichen-clad detail of Transport, Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir’s timeless 1963 motorway signage typeface. This beautiful yet tragic vision of a modernist ruin is juxtaposed with brutal PowerPoint titles set in Verdana. An instinctive graphic designer’s despair at such calamity is countered by a gradual recognition of potential conceptual typographic genius. Post-IKEA web-safe ersatz-Futura titles, paralleled with Robinson’s poetic explorations of British post-industrial ruin, become a romantic gesture commemorating — and perhaps lamenting — the gradual death of modernism in typography.

More at The Guardian (including a literary reading of the lichen shapes that I didn’t originally spot).