The longer I go on and keep designing things, the more convinced I am that all text design should be in either Helvetica or Futura. If you can't make perfectly interesting yet clean and useful things with those two seminal fonts, you're just not a designer. Anything from punk rock to an IRS tax form to the authoritarian TARGET logo build identity around these bland-assed fonts, particularly Helvetica. All the personalization you need is in the huge variety of weights and widths and oblique styles and such that are offered with these fully fleshed-out
actual font sets.
The trick is just to arrange them in a weird way or add a graphical logo to set them off, like the Target bullseye or squashing the two words together like AmericanAirlines or using all uppercase like Target does, etc.
You could take the word "tikka," put it in all lowercase using the hyper-skinny Helvetica, make a solid black circle to the left of the word and put an uppercase white bold Helvetica T in there. Stuff like that conveys the name and becomes recognizable (iconic, even), fits easily into page layout, sends a message of intelligence and modernity and a lack of bullshit. Then you win.
Here is a version of my webpage that I spent Xteen hours on and never finished, kind of like the way I do music. It contains nothing but cheesy repeating filler text and leads nowhere, but it illustrates a little bit how you can take a brutal font like Helvetica and make it at least a little whitebread funky, kind of like Karl Rove rapping.
http://www.coffeeemergency.com/nucoffeeemergency.com/
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