Comments on: Arial vs Helvetica

By: Season Frayne

Season Frayne — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 21:00:29 +0000

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 .

By: Pixel Acres » Blog Archive » Reconsidering Arial

Pixel Acres » Blog Archive » Reconsidering Arial — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:32:41 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: John Gillespie

John Gillespie — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:52:48 +0000

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.

By: Jonathan Nicol

Jonathan Nicol — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:36:39 +0000

@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 =-.

By: John Gillespie

John Gillespie — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 23:58:07 +0000

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 =-.

By: Jonathan Nicol

Jonathan Nicol — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 05:34:15 +0000

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.