Arial is not the same as Helvetica, Arial is not the same as Helvetica, typeset in 48pt tightly kerned text and copy and paste after me…
Arial, the ubiquitous Windows system font found everywhere from your boss’s email signature at work to the pass-me-on emails your that your grandma keeps on sending, is definitely not Helvetica as you can see above, but it is for all intents and purposes the poor mans’ version of, copied appropriated and shipped by Microsoft with Windows 3.1:
A contemporary sans serif design, Arial contains more humanist characteristics than many of its predecessors and as such is more in tune with the mood of the last decades of the twentieth century.
While not sure what the copywriters at Microsoft were drinking, or what definition of humanism they were impersonating in writing that, we can be sure of one thing—that the world has been inadequately typeset ever since Arial plagiarised its way into ubiquity and the top of the Word application font menu.
To quote designer and typographer Mark Simonson:
Arial’s ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It’s actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor.
Read more about the dubious history of Arial in Simonson’s The Scourge of Arial
Arial has two very important things going for it:
1. It is installed by default on both Mac and Windows systems.
2. It is hinted to render extremely well at small point size on screen. I’m not sure how well Helvetica renders on a Mac, but on Windows systems it looks severely crap at small point sizes.
Thanks for the points about Arial Jonathan, you’ve caught me with my print rather than web hat on this time. Back in the day Arial used to cause postscript errors when printing or converting to pdf, and would often revert to courier were you negligent enough to let a single embedded character bypass your vigilant, font-managing eye. Several hundred dollars of re-output film later, and Arial would be a very dirty word…
.-= John Gillespie´s last blog ..I apologise for this automatic reply to your email =-.
@John – Arial for printing sounds a nightmare! *shudder*
Your post, and our subsequent conversation has inpired me to kickstart my own blog again, with a new article about the differences between the way Helvetica and Arial render in Windows!
.-= Jonathan Nicol´s last post: Reconsidering Arial =-.
Nice article on font hinting Jonathan.
While I would normally take the fan boy route and back Apple to the “core”, there is something to be said for Microsoft’s approach here—even I can’t deny that their classic web fonts—Arial, Georgia and Verdana—just “work” on the web and screen, the platforms they were explicitly designed for, and when reading text in a browser at very small sizes, function over form is a very practical approach to take.
[...] friend John Gillespie recently wrote about the inauspicious origins of the Arial typeface, namely that it is a none-too-subtle copy of Helvetica. While I agree with [...]
Hey guys, I am sorry for being offtopic but what theme are you using on this blog? or did you create it by yourself? I love the theme .