
The Scourge of Arial (2001) - rangibaby
http://www.marksimonson.com/notebook/view/the-scourge-of-arial
======
TazeTSchnitzel
I decided to make a test page to compare them:

[http://i.imgur.com/djhRrwb.png](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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ArialMTsp.svg)
and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HelveticaSpecimenCH.svg](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.

~~~
bluthru
>I kinda like Arial's slightly tilted ends.

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.

~~~
jonnathanson
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.

~~~
vinceguidry
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.

------
nness
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.

~~~
to3m
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.)

------
JacobAldridge
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).

~~~
negativity

      Arial
      Tahoma
      Verdana
      Calibri
    

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.)

~~~
JacobAldridge
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.

------
jfb
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.

------
quanticle
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.

~~~
hatmatrix
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).

------
jmount
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.

~~~
J_Darnley
You're forgetting the numeral-1

~~~
lgas
I suspect that's what was meant by "one".

~~~
J_Darnley
Well... don't I feel silly.

------
partomniscient
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?

