
So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica? - AlexMuir
http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/
======
ef4
I really don't consider myself a typography expert or designer, but I found
that easy and got a perfect score.

There are obvious tells in almost all of them -- mostly lowercase "s", "c",
etc, in which Helvetica is has perfectly level edges and arial is angled.

The only harder ones are some of the all caps examples like TOYOTA.

~~~
reidmain
That is almost the exact experience I had. I got 17/20 and the ones I screwed
up all had capital letters.

I couldn't see any difference between Mattel and Toyota.

~~~
etfb
The perfectly round "O" was the giveaway for me. Helvetica just feels more
"literal" to me, if that makes any sense, with its perfectly horizontal
endings on "C" and "S" and "t", so the round "O" seemed more likely. Mattel
nearly tripped me up too, but I noticed that Helvetica was bolder throughout
than the Arial equivalent, so it wasn't hard.

~~~
callum85
O isn't perfectly round in Helvetica. The Toyota logo is modified to use
perfect circles for the Os. The real O is a bit rounder than in Arial maybe,
but still not a circle. Futura is the one with the perfect circles (for both O
and o).

~~~
threedaymonk
Toyota was the only one I got wrong: it was the round Os that threw me off. I
thought Helvetica didn't look like that, and, well, it doesn't.

------
jsilence
Thank you, now you have ruined Arial for me.

Before this test I considered the differences negligible, without really
knowing what the differences are. Now I consider Helvetica much more elegant
and incisive.

~~~
aidos
Maybe it is more elegant, but if you don't want cross browser, cross platform
rendering issues you'll stick with Arial.

~~~
Trezoid
No, you should stick with verdana. It's fully cross-platform, designed from
the start to be a screen font, and generally looks better.

Alternatively, @font-face is supported by just about everything at this point,
opening up the opportunity to use much better fonts, like open sans

(also, helvetica is a print font. It doesn't work for body copy at the sizes
commonly used for screen text.)

~~~
navs
Learn something new every day. I've always used Helvetica on all my web pages
at the behest of my design co-worker. He's a print designer so it makes sense
now.

~~~
PeterisP
I hope you do test how it looks on windows? I've worked with a webdesigner
that often chose fonts that worked perfectly on his mac, but looked really
ugly on all windows browsers, since the fonts were unavailable and the
substitutes had noticable style/width differences.

------
jongold
Ruining the game for everyone; two things I love about Helvetica

— Terminals at right angles to the stroke.
<http://c.jon.gd/image/3Q0y2u323j3C> . Arial looks particularly sloppy with
jaunty terminals. It is possible to have a similar grotesque sans-serif feel
with offset terminals (see Univers & Akzidenz Grotesk) but they're a crucial
part of what give Helvetica its character. \- The uppercase R. Has a really
strong leg compared to Arial's half-assed flaky leg.

~~~
visarga
I immediately got 17/20, missing only the ones where there were no lower case
characters. How do you distinguish between in these 3 cases?
<http://imgur.com/a/NOLoI>

~~~
stevanl
1) Completely round O = Helvetica 2) The C's. Helvetica = flat endings not
slanted 3) Like a perfectly round O, the M's have more of a squarish spacing

~~~
dlitz
Hmm. I see a completely round O in "TOYOTA", but not in "THE NORTH FACE". Is
it just me?

------
calinet6
Yes, the differences are easy to see, as everyone has said.

But the important part is that there's a difference in feel and theme that's
not really measurable and identifiable in direct comparison.

The subtle difference is far more important than trying to identify the tiny
details that don't really matter. And in that sense, this game (while fun and
interesting) misses the point.

~~~
dsr_
It's entirely measurable. Helvetica has slightly heavier strokes, which are
finished at right angles or closer to that than Arial, and prefers verticals
and horizontals in general compared to Arial.

~~~
calinet6
Yes, but why would you use one over the other?

~~~
jongold
Because it gives the text a different character on a macro level.

~~~
rquantz
I believe that is what he's trying to say. You don't use Arial because it
terminates at right angles, you use it because it feels different.

~~~
timr
You use it because it's the only option you have under Windows.

~~~
svachalek
I've always heard the Helvetica snobbery (and haven't used Windows much since
the 90s) so I was a little surprised to find that in most cases, I found the
Arial logo more attractive. Helvetica has a little more "heavy-handed" feel to
it which worked for short words in all-caps, but I thought the lighter look of
Arial worked better for the rest.

~~~
timr
Horses for courses, but you're in the minority. Helvetica is pretty widely
considered a more aesthetically appealing font, especially amongst those who
have a lot of points of reference.

It's like art: you develop more sophisticated tastes as you're exposed to
better things. It's hard to say this without sounding snobbish, but if all
you've seen is Arial, you'll find Arial familiar and comfortable. But the more
time you spend looking at good typography, the more Arial will start to hurt
your eyes.

------
jonathanjaeger
Here's something interesting to do with the same test. Instead of guessing
which one you think is Helvetica, choose the one you like better. Then see if
Helvetica shows up more times than Arial (or vice versa).

~~~
snu
Great idea! Personally I had no bias towards either font, but now discovered
that I do in fact like Helvetica a bit more (12 out of 20 times). Would be
interesting to be able to see a test like that with statistics on how many
chose each font for each logo.

~~~
jonathanjaeger
Yeah, going into it I didn't know much about the differences between the fonts
but was curious anyway. After getting a few wrong I switched to choosing which
ones I thought looked nicer and started getting Helvetica more times. That
reminds me I need to finish watching the Helvetica documentary.

------
sp332
<http://typewar.com/> quizzes you on letters from an increasing number of
fonts, and scores you according to how many other people got a particular
matchup correct. They also have "quests" that focus on a particular challenge,
including Arial vs. Helvetica. <http://typewar.com/quests/> I think my
favorite part of the site is the statistics on how many people are confused by
particular matchups.

------
neya
This one is fairly easy simply because they show you a comparison. In reality,
if they showed you only one type of font and if they had asked you to identify
which font it was (Arial or Helvetica), then it would have been a REAL
challenge :)

------
mambodog
The MATTEL one was hard, but I just assumed the one with crappy kerning was
Arial, and sure enough...

~~~
ruswick
The thing that gave away the Mattel logo was the E. Apparently, the middle bar
of the capital E in Arial is not equidistant from the outer bars, whereas the
E in Helvetica has equally-spaced bars. (Or legs, or whatever the hell they
are.)

This was just something I noticed for the first time while going through.

------
quarterto
Yes. Yes I do. 19/20, and the one I got wrong was Mattel.

~~~
Alexx
Yeah, the Mattel one was the only one that wasn't instantly obvious. Just
happens to have the only few letters in Arial and Helvetica that are actually
comparable. 3M was the funniest, looks shocking in Arial.

------
gotoY
Good idea to call the images foo-helvetica.gif & foo-arial.gif. :)

~~~
navs
Now now, that's cheating :)

------
guessWhy
I used the following heuristics (some parts added afterwards):

1\. Helvetica has level edges, Arial is angled (as ef4 said). Particularly
important were "t", "e" and "a", "S", "G", C".

2a. For capital letters, if there is an "R", the Helvetica one is curved in
the bottom right part while Arial uses a straight line.

2b. For a capital "Y", the Arial one has the same length in all directions
while the Helvetica one is shorter at the bottom. (Alexx indicated a
difference).

2c. The jags/gaps in the capital "M" extend further to the top for Arial. This
can be used to figure out MATTEL.

3\. Otherwise, the one that looks fatter is Helvetica.

------
EEGuy
No typographer nor designer here either, but _subjectively_ speaking:

* This test quickly 'clued me in' that a logo should give a "commanding", "authoritative", "brooks no argument" look. Helvetica, yes; Ariel, no: Ariel made some logos look downright self-satirical.

* An email client I use has Ariel as its default font. In that (two-way communication) context, where accidental antagonisms can arise, Ariel seems to "look less antagonistic"

* So this test speaks to me about appropriate fonts for two different contexts, and personal point-of-view.

* Got 20/20, but might not on a 2nd run. I'm only human.

~~~
crntaylor
Not a criticism, but I'm genuinely confused about the persistent misspelling
of 'Arial' as 'Ariel'. Is there anyone knowledgeable about this sort of thing
who can explain why it's so prevalent?

~~~
VLM
If you opened a clothing altering retail shop called "Taylor Shop" WRT your HN
name, you'd have to expect a large fraction of the population to write your
establishments name as "Tailor Shop"

Likewise there's only one Arial font but tens of thousands of girls named
Ariel, so odds are your font is going to get spelled Ariel an awful lot by
people who think Ariel first as either a human girl or a movie character.

------
J2K
Fun test. Also if anyone's interested in Helvetica or typesetting in general
just watched a pretty good documentary recently that got me more interested in
the topic: <http://www.helveticafilm.com/>, also available on netflix:
<https://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Helvetica/70076125>

Sorta similar to the 'Objectified' doc that was recommended by HackDesign but
I actually liked this one better.

------
speeder
I am a designer (I mean, actually I am a coder that for some freaking bizarre
reason got a design degree), and got a 19/20.

For "Mattel" my choice ended being random.

------
jspiros
20/20. Mattel was the only one I was uncertain of, but the correct answer was
slightly blurrier, due to it probably being an actual logo copy scaled down or
up slightly, as opposed to a "freshly-made" duplicate for the purpose of the
test.

Toyota was easy enough, as the capital "O" in Helvetica is more oval than
round in Arial, and more round than oval in Helvetica.

I'm not a designer, I'm a developer, but I do enjoy typography.

~~~
skoob
> the capital "O" in Helvetica is more oval than round in Arial, and more
> round than oval in Helvetica.

The Os in the Toyota logo have been modified and made more round, though. This
is what "TOYOTA" looks like in plain Helvetica: <http://myfonts.us/td-RQ1hNh>

The Os in the Arial and Helvetica are practically identical.

------
wging
A much more interesting question than "Arial or Helvetica" would be: "Which
one looks better?" Then you could ask how well the answer correlated with
Helvetica vs Arial.

This question is good for seeing whether people know what they're looking at,
but the point of using one font over the other isn't to show you prefer the
'correct' font, but to be invisibly better than other choices in one way or
another.

~~~
brudgers
The problem is that there was a lot more effort put into the originals than
their knockoffs in Arial. The originals were produced with a designed typeface
- and typefaces are tweeked for size. The Arial knockoffs obviously used
scaled up versions in several cases. The knockoffs didn't get the same
attention to kerning either.

------
aidos
This is a question that's close to my heart. As a developer I've spent
inordinate amounts of time getting Helvetica working properly in websites.

I can tell the difference between them, it's obvious when you know what to
look for. Is it so much better that it's worth the effort required? Definitely
not in my opinion.

I have a special place reserved in Hell for that font.

------
Swizec
As a programmer I got 11/20, so juuuust slightly better than random guessing.
And I was trying so hard too!

~~~
supercanuck
10/20 - I'm a complete failure.

------
SquareWheel
If you just pick the fuzzier looking image you'll get the majority of them.
Very neat idea though.

------
fotoblur
Got 19 out of 20. I missed the Panasonic one.

What I like most about Helvetica is the top of the t is flat rather than sharp
and there is less stylizing overall. Arial, for me, breaks the philosophy of
stylizing for stylizing sake. Helvetica, IMHO, was already perfect.

This makes me remember the Essay by Adolf Loos' Ornament and Crime (1929)
(<http://technical-english.wikidot.com/text-1-2>). Albeit bordering on racist
propaganda contains very valid points on ornamentation being wasteful which I
believe was a hallmark of Dieter Rams philosophy, "Good design is as little
design as possible" which highly influences Apple's industrial designer
Jonathan Ive.

------
moostapha
Terrible test. I got 19/20 based entirely on knowing what the original logos
looked like on a few of them (Agfa and DEC, mostly). I thought I'd fail
because I've never paid attention to those fonts.

If it was done with novel text, the results would have been different.

------
andrelaszlo
The bad kerning gives it away on more than one occasion (American Apparel for
example).

------
kalleboo
I got about 50/50 but got bored and gave up after 16 so I don't know my score.
I don't stare at small details on fonts normally like people here do, so I
mostly tried to pick which one looked "right".

------
ianstallings
I got through about 15 questions, had flash backs to the documentary
"Helvetica" where it's just never ending stream of examples for 1 1/2 hours
and couldn't take anymore. I'll take your word for it.

------
Tyr42
I knew nothing about typography, guessed the first one with a lowercase r
right, used that to get the rest of the lowercase ones. I only failed the
uppercase ones. 16/20

------
tlrobinson
I didn't initially know all the obvious differences, but I picked the one that
looked "right" or "better" and still got 16/20.

After reading tip offs here I got 19/20 (all except Toyota)

------
pwthornton
Too bad this test isn't a higer DPI. It's easier to tell the differences, and
see the subtleness of Helvetica at higher DPIs. Helvetica is a font designed
for print, but it also looks good on HiDPI/Retina displays.

On my Retina MacBook Pro this whole test is a blurry mess. I had to bring it
over to my non-Retina display to take it. But the differences between Arial
and Helvetica pop a lot more on a better display.

------
bhauer
Fun short game. Enjoyed it!

I got 19/20. Messed up on "STAPLES" because I got over-confident and started
selecting too quickly by the end.

The easiest way to distinguish the two, in my opinion, is that Helvetica uses
horizontal cuts to letter strokes. So I should have seen that the capital 'S'
in STAPLES had slightly off-axis cuts in my selection. Perhaps what tricked me
is that the STAPLES logo itself is off-axis.

------
sejje
I'm a lowly developer and have never even heard the debate about Helvetica. I
couldn't have told you the first thing about it. It took me two slides to
figure out that "the one I like" is Arial, and pick the opposite. I missed
three more, but they were incredibly similar (TOYOTA, MATTEL).

Anyway, this difference is quite obvious in general, I'm not sure what the
author is on about.

------
crntaylor
This is silly. I know nothing about the difference between Arial and
Helvetica. If anything thought that Helvetica was slightly lighter, so in the
first question I guessed at the lighter of the two fonts, which it turns out
was Arial. Every question after that I guessed the heavier of the two fonts,
and I got a 19/20 score.

------
rgo
Missed American Airlines. But I think it actually looks more balanced with
Arial, the original feels a bit squeezed.

------
viggity
There are (at least) three "bugs" in this quiz (i.e. artifacts from the
alteration). The person who made them must have a crappy monitor if the
differences weren't noticeable. That, or they were just sloppy. Still, fun
quiz though.

Here are the bugs:

<http://imgur.com/a/S2aDO>

------
nnq
...wow, this turn my mind into believing Arial looks better than Helvetica
most of the time! Blasphemy!!!

------
ruswick
I only missed one, which was do to negligence and not ignorance. Moreover, I'm
not even cursorily trained in design or typography.

This doesn't seem that hard. Any perceptive person can determine the
differences immediately through deduction and use them to differentiate
throughout the test.

------
GIFtheory
I guessed that, given that Arial was probably a Helvetica clone, its designers
probably added superfluous flourishes to differentiate it. That led me to
notice the weirdly angled edges in Arial, which gave away most of them. So,
yeah, proof of why Arial is dumb.

------
HSO
It would be interesting to see how purportedly "design-conscious" people
performed _without_ the immediate feedback and the juxtapositions. Also, since
these are logos, aimed at gut feelings, the test should be timed, e.g. you
must answer within 1 sec or so.

------
nej
Got a 18 out of 20. To me Arial looks a bit informal when compared to
Helvetica. While Helvetica has level edges, Arial feels more loose and
forgiving. I use both fonts in Applications but never really looked at them up
close until now. Thank your or this test.

------
keithpeter
Nicely done. I got most of those wrong! Which is why I leave typography to
typographers.

Suggestion: wrong response page has a small graphic that emphasises a
difference between Arial and Helvetica. e.g. the shape of the top part of the
lower case r, &c

Then you have a teaching tool...

------
rtkwe
I'd never bothered comparing them before, never used Helvetica that I can
remember, and I got 17/20. 2 at the start till I noticed the obvious lower
case differences. The only other one was MATELL which difficult, didn't notice
the difference in the As.

------
PeterisP
I used to think that this doesn't matter, as both fonts in text seemed good to
me - but now in these logos, all cases where I was able to distinguish them,
the Arial version was butt ugly and the original far better looking even to my
non-designer eye.

------
kunai
Ha, I remember taking this test quite a while back when I was obsessed with
typography.

Took it again and got a 18. In terms of the actual font design, Helvetica
always felt more "natural" and "composed," whereas Arial always felt much more
focused on pure readability.

------
andrelaszlo
You can clearly see the black brush on the almost black background in the
SCOTCH logotype :D

------
Yver
I just picked whichever looked better and got 18/20. Failed on Crate&Barrel
and Mattel.

------
paul_f
I picked the one the "looked" better and got 5 out of 20 right. Guess I just
prefer Arial.

------
nvr219
I got 15/20. What I learned from this quiz is I actually prefer the lowercase
S in Arial.

------
joejohnson
Here's a handy reference that shows the distinguishing differences between the
two typefaces: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Similar_typefaces>

------
cgmorton
I played a different game called 'which one appeals to me more on first
glance'. I ended up with a perfect 10/10 split.

Could it be that different fonts will be more aesthetically pleasing for
different uses? Even if they're typographically similar??

------
Gravityloss
Didn't anyone judge them by how good they _looked_ ? Not "pixel peeping" but
the general outlook.

Arial looks vertically uneven somehow - the tops of the letters of a word seem
to form a more solid straight line with Helvetica.

------
PetitPrince
I'm no designer nor typographer and got a 16. I felt that most of the time the
Helvetica variant was heavier (as in, more bold) most of the time. I had no
idea of the different R and of the right angled stroke.

------
andrelaszlo
That was easy. I read this article about a year ago and once you've seen it,
you can't unsee it :)

<http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html>

------
gulbrandr
One service that I like from this site is the shorter thesaurus [0]. You enter
a long word and receive shorter synonyms.

[0] <http://www.ironicsans.com/thsrs/>

------
chris_wot
It's the "r" that's usually the give away. However, I would have to say that
the capital "S" is also a giveaway, and the I'd have to say that the letters
with Helvetica are somewhat _fatter_...

------
theanalyst
Fun game, loved it, though G, lowercase edges can solve most cases. It comes
down to kerning in the more difficult ones, Helvetica is a perfect Geometric
Sans, and that should help in most cases

------
pbhjpbhj
I like it.

I couldn't tell at the start and so I guessed based on which logos looked best
composed, then I noticed the uniqueness particularly in r and t letter forms.

This actually gave me a new respect Helvetica.

------
SifJar
18/20, and I'm no design/typography expert. As others have said, it was on
capitals. But the point of the site is clearly to show people can't tell the
difference, and I can.

------
loup-vaillant
I got 3 out of twenty, 2 of which I was lucky to see the capital R. I guess I
_can_ tell the difference, though I'd be careful to reverse all my answers in
the future.

------
Nux
"You answered 18 out of 20 questions correctly." I didn't even know the
difference between the two until today (can't be bothered with fonts and
suchlike).

------
yardie
I flew right through them. The MATTEL logo gave me a slight pause, picking the
prettier, more symmetrical choice made it easier to identify the remainder.

------
faramarz
If you know what you're looking for, the test is fairly easy. It get's tricky
in case of ALL CAPPS that don't include the letter 'R'. I got MATTEL wrong.

------
aleprok
I'm not really good with the fonts and their differences, but after the first
one which I failed I got 18/20 and the other I failed which was TOYOTA.

------
brainless
Fun spoiler: do NOT look at the image SRC. I liked the game, but I did what
any idiot would when they see such pages - Inspect Element. Damn!

------
adieulot
I noticed that I can do pretty good just by quickly detecting which one is the
most unfamiliar font, as I am and always have been on Windows.

------
aneth4
I got one wrong. I attribute that not to my genius but to having seen the
excellent documentary "Helvetica".

Turns out that's an excellent home date movie.

------
efnx
I found the giveaway is in lowercase t, s, c and uppercase R. Helvetia tries
to snap most terminating edges horizontally.

------
curiousdannii
Very easy for all but MATTEL. For MATTEL I went with the one which was kerned
better, and no surprise, it was Helvetica!

------
paltman
Check out <http://typewar.com/quests/quest/1/>

------
Kluny
It's very easy - all I did was think "Which one looks better?" and I got it
right every time.

------
dutchbrit
Shame that Arial doesn't come in light & medium weight (as windows alternative
to Mac)

------
tbirdz
Apparently, judging from my perfect score, I can easily tell them apart.

------
fbomb
I got 17 out of 20. I just picked the ones that looked better to me.

------
el_cuadrado
20/20, although MATTEL was tricky. That pesky capital 'A'.

------
Semiapies
Apparently, the answer is "Easily, unless it's all caps."

------
jbrooksuk
20/20 _BUT_ it was almost 19 because of Mattel.

------
rkjaer
20/20 - a few hard ones though. Fun quiz :)

------
JimmaDaRustla
I got 90%...what is the point of this?

------
klrr
Haha, fun test, got 14 of 20 right!

------
MrBra
can you tell a green field..

------
richbradshaw
19/20 Mattel was impossible!

~~~
looki
I don't even remember and I'm too lazy to look at it again, but I think I
recognized Mattel because of the letter spacing. I just assumed Helvetica is
the one with better spacing. Guess what, it worked.

------
uptown
Yes - 19/20 Botched Mattel

