If Arial is the scourge of the world outside of professional design, then Helvetica is the scourge of the world inside. It appears on almost every design, every logo, every brand. I think it has come to be as bleached and unremarkable as Arial itself.
But despite that, the history of the two types and how they came into existence and captured two unique but significant chunks of the world is a fascinating story.
The comment that Arial is "a not-very-faithful imitation of a typeface that is no longer fashionable" struck me as odd too. "No longer fashionable"? Well, that may have been the case in 2001. I suppose 2001 really must have been a long time ago! All the designers I've known who've had any interest in type love Helvetica.
One even had a sample of it tattooed on their arm. I thought this a touch extreme, but Google image search says it is quite common.
(For my part, I always preferred Arial at lower point sizes. At 10pt, it's so attractive - not a pixel out of place! Its own Arial is Arial Unicode, a misshapen imitation that just doesn't sit right. I wonder what Arial Unicode's Arial is. Comic Sans, I suppose.)
To be fair, Microsoft has gone some way in addressing the "scourge of Arial". For some time now, the default font in Office has been Calibri, not Arial.
I've spent hours setting up a really vanilla templates with for Word and Powerpoint with Helvetica as the default font for everything (text box, headings, etc.) and black lines/shapes with no shadows...
I applaud Microsoft for becoming "more original" but that's been a big headache (constantly discovering another default setting I need to change).
Once you insist that you have to be able to distinguish all of: one, capital-L, lower-case-L, capital-i, and lower-case-i (and maybe letter-O from zero) there are not that many fonts to choose between.
Helvetica hipsters are pretty irritating; if you're going to reject Arial, at least do so in favor of a better typeface, like Akzidenz Grotesk or Frutiger or something.
I've never been a 'font snob' - nor especially aware of their differences. I'm a "I'll like it when I see it" kind of guy.
I've never minded Arial. The standard font when I was at school was Times New Roman, so I associate that with blandness. My first office job, back around the time this article was written, specified Tahoma for everything - it felt bigger, cleaner, and I still use it sometimes. So I was never forced into an Arial world where it might frustrate or bore me - it's perfunctory, but I'm OK with it.
Calibri I have never liked, before it was a default and especially now that it's everywhere. Again, I couldn't tell you why - it just feels to me to be tight and whiny.
We recently transitioned to Verdana, another 'older' font that I'm enjoying seeing again regularly (though I'm struggling with choosing the right font size to balance readability with the appearance of voluminousness).
And most chances I get, I default back to Georgia. It often feels a little too firm or strange for a company font, but I love seeing it in the wild (and especially the quirkiness of Georgian numbers).
The mystery behind the prevalence and your exposure to each of these font faces can be answered in two words: Microsoft Windows.
Each can also be associated with particular versions and sections of the MS Windows user interface, and thus time periods as well. With these four fonts, each being sans serif, the raster representations of them were carefully measured by Microsoft, to provide users with highly legible, practical type faces.
Arial: the oldest of the standardized MS font package shipped with Windows, and used heavily on printed marketing materials and as logo type since Windows 95 and maybe earlier. The flagship font for Microsoft for many years, contributing greatly to its prevalence.
Tahoma: with Windows 2000, tahoma was the default UI font, with lucida console being used by notepad.exe (although notepad and the UI were both configurable), and many of the font fields where users entered data. This held its position until roughly 2007. People used it because they new it would be reliably present.
Verdana: 2nd only to helvetica among many digital graphic designers, and the helvetica stand-in on windows. In fact, because of the absence of helvetica by default on windows (you had to download it ,or purchase it, or 3rd party software that came with it), as opposed to macintosh which provided helvetica in it's font set out-of-the box, and yet the market share of microsoft dominating over apple, more websites balanced their design to render well with verdana over helvetica. More often than not, you'll see CSS styles applied in the following order: helvetica, verdana, arial, sans serif.
Calibri: the reasons you dislike this font are two. reason one, the much-hated windows vista is where this font made its debut as the interface default on windows, so there's probably some negative psychological aftertaste hanging in the air, what with all the pain vista inflicted. reason two: the abominable CLEARTYPE sub-pixel font renderer which first appeared with Internet Explorer 8 on windows XP, but became pervasive and omni-present with windows vista, and truly made vista look like SHIT. Screenshots of text on vista were forever contaminated by cleartype. the groupthink of focus group testing produced nigh-infallible statistics absolutely proving to so many very important decision making people that discriminating users who know, always preferred cleartype. I suspect that the testing was influenced by the display monitors tested on. cleartype rendering was improved by the time Windows 7 was released, and monitors were better by then too, but no one cared, and Microsoft's market momentum was absolutely destroyed by then, so it didn't (and doesn't) matter anymore.
Which leaves us with the two serif fonts you made mention of...
Georgia: again, a Microsoft font. I think this is gaining popularity among Windows Phone users, but I'm not entirely certain of this.
That leads us to the inevitable...
Times New Roman: the un-killable highlander of fonts. There's a reason why it's used everywhere as the de-facto, ultra-generic fall-back default, especially in web browsers. Everyone can use it royalty free, and it's the one thing, even blood-thirsty competitors will reliably provide as common ground across platforms. They won't get sued for it. Strangely, even though it may be used royalty free, it's not truly a public domain font. (...owned by News Corp? weird.)
I was going to make a Windows-centric comment, but my career has been so Windows-centric that I'm actually not sure what's Windows and what's not (because I've had such limited experience with "what's not").
As to the rest of your reply - just wow. And thank you. Such a detailed and amazingly interesting analysis that cuts to the heart of my career through something as seemingly distinct as font selection. I appreciate you taking the time to share it.
I just want to say I recently fired up an old ThinkPad from 1999 and man, pixels were big back then. I opened up Word '98 and started typing and those big, pixelated, non-antialiased Times New Roman letters looked fantastic on that old screen.
They really are almost identical. But I'm not sure if Helvetica is the superior typeface. I kinda like Arial's slightly tilted ends, while Helvetica's a has a nicer tail than Arial's.
This is one of the things that subconsciously contributes to people being irritated by Arial. The arbitrary angles of Arial lack the rigor of the orthogonal ends.
Agreed. Arial is internally inconsistent. The canting of the tails, the length of the strokes, the curves, etc., seem haphazard and ad hoc depending on the letter.
I've never been completely enamored of Helvetica, but at least it's stylistically cohesive.
Arial's 'e' always bugged me. Helvetica has a taller x-height that gives the 'e' room to breathe. Arial's looks like a trollface. Arial's 'a' is reminiscent of an awkward twelve-year old.
Helvetica's shoulder curves have elegance, its 'm' is downright stately. The swoop of Arial's 'g' is timid and fearful. The bowl of Arial's 'o' looks like a stop sign, Helvetica's is properly elliptical.
There are a lot of details that the average person wouldn't notice, per se, but that add up to a subconscious feeling, style, or perception of quality.
I wonder whether Arial would have been just as popular with the 'non professionals' as the article puts it - if it wasn't near the top of an alphabetically sorted list of fonts?
26 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 67.6 ms ] threadBut despite that, the history of the two types and how they came into existence and captured two unique but significant chunks of the world is a fascinating story.
One even had a sample of it tattooed on their arm. I thought this a touch extreme, but Google image search says it is quite common.
(For my part, I always preferred Arial at lower point sizes. At 10pt, it's so attractive - not a pixel out of place! Its own Arial is Arial Unicode, a misshapen imitation that just doesn't sit right. I wonder what Arial Unicode's Arial is. Comic Sans, I suppose.)
I applaud Microsoft for becoming "more original" but that's been a big headache (constantly discovering another default setting I need to change).
I've never minded Arial. The standard font when I was at school was Times New Roman, so I associate that with blandness. My first office job, back around the time this article was written, specified Tahoma for everything - it felt bigger, cleaner, and I still use it sometimes. So I was never forced into an Arial world where it might frustrate or bore me - it's perfunctory, but I'm OK with it.
Calibri I have never liked, before it was a default and especially now that it's everywhere. Again, I couldn't tell you why - it just feels to me to be tight and whiny.
We recently transitioned to Verdana, another 'older' font that I'm enjoying seeing again regularly (though I'm struggling with choosing the right font size to balance readability with the appearance of voluminousness).
And most chances I get, I default back to Georgia. It often feels a little too firm or strange for a company font, but I love seeing it in the wild (and especially the quirkiness of Georgian numbers).
Each can also be associated with particular versions and sections of the MS Windows user interface, and thus time periods as well. With these four fonts, each being sans serif, the raster representations of them were carefully measured by Microsoft, to provide users with highly legible, practical type faces.
Arial: the oldest of the standardized MS font package shipped with Windows, and used heavily on printed marketing materials and as logo type since Windows 95 and maybe earlier. The flagship font for Microsoft for many years, contributing greatly to its prevalence.
Tahoma: with Windows 2000, tahoma was the default UI font, with lucida console being used by notepad.exe (although notepad and the UI were both configurable), and many of the font fields where users entered data. This held its position until roughly 2007. People used it because they new it would be reliably present.
Verdana: 2nd only to helvetica among many digital graphic designers, and the helvetica stand-in on windows. In fact, because of the absence of helvetica by default on windows (you had to download it ,or purchase it, or 3rd party software that came with it), as opposed to macintosh which provided helvetica in it's font set out-of-the box, and yet the market share of microsoft dominating over apple, more websites balanced their design to render well with verdana over helvetica. More often than not, you'll see CSS styles applied in the following order: helvetica, verdana, arial, sans serif.
Calibri: the reasons you dislike this font are two. reason one, the much-hated windows vista is where this font made its debut as the interface default on windows, so there's probably some negative psychological aftertaste hanging in the air, what with all the pain vista inflicted. reason two: the abominable CLEARTYPE sub-pixel font renderer which first appeared with Internet Explorer 8 on windows XP, but became pervasive and omni-present with windows vista, and truly made vista look like SHIT. Screenshots of text on vista were forever contaminated by cleartype. the groupthink of focus group testing produced nigh-infallible statistics absolutely proving to so many very important decision making people that discriminating users who know, always preferred cleartype. I suspect that the testing was influenced by the display monitors tested on. cleartype rendering was improved by the time Windows 7 was released, and monitors were better by then too, but no one cared, and Microsoft's market momentum was absolutely destroyed by then, so it didn't (and doesn't) matter anymore.
Which leaves us with the two serif fonts you made mention of...
Georgia: again, a Microsoft font. I think this is gaining popularity among Windows Phone users, but I'm not entirely certain of this.
That leads us to the inevitable...
Times New Roman: the un-killable highlander of fonts. There's a reason why it's used everywhere as the de-facto, ultra-generic fall-back default, especially in web browsers. Everyone can use it royalty free, and it's the one thing, even blood-thirsty competitors will reliably provide as common ground across platforms. They won't get sued for it. Strangely, even though it may be used royalty free, it's not truly a public domain font. (...owned by News Corp? weird.)
As to the rest of your reply - just wow. And thank you. Such a detailed and amazingly interesting analysis that cuts to the heart of my career through something as seemingly distinct as font selection. I appreciate you taking the time to share it.
http://i.imgur.com/djhRrwb.png
They really are almost identical. But I'm not sure if Helvetica is the superior typeface. I kinda like Arial's slightly tilted ends, while Helvetica's a has a nicer tail than Arial's.
Comparing Wikipedia's two sample images (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ArialMTsp.svg and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HelveticaSpecimenCH.svg), I prefer the tail of Arial's capital R to Helvetica's.
If you were to make a site that displayed in Arial half the time and Helvetica the rest of the time, would anyone notice? I doubt it.
This is one of the things that subconsciously contributes to people being irritated by Arial. The arbitrary angles of Arial lack the rigor of the orthogonal ends.
I've never been completely enamored of Helvetica, but at least it's stylistically cohesive.
Helvetica's shoulder curves have elegance, its 'm' is downright stately. The swoop of Arial's 'g' is timid and fearful. The bowl of Arial's 'o' looks like a stop sign, Helvetica's is properly elliptical.
Liberation Sans is metrically identical to Arial, and yet it is hideous.