Tuesday, February 19, 2008
My Favorite Pseudo-Helvetica - An Ode To Arial
Monotype's Arial, or Arial MT, or Sonoran San Serif some old-school designers... I use this font more than any other font in my advertisements, user interfaces and layouts. As well, I see it regularly used in the works of hundreds of others. Based on Monotype's Grotesque, it has become the most common Haas/Linotype's Helvetica knock-off thanks to it's default inclusion in most popular computer operating systems, and being one of the 10 core web fonts. The latest OTF version of Arial describes itself, through its embedded description, as...
"When in doubt, use Helvetica" was one of the first lessons in page layout I was ever taught. Back when Apple and Adobe were the shiznit tag-team of design, and PostScript was the de facto page description king, I depended on Helvetica quite often. When PostScript started to wane in popularity to the numerous clones and fledgling standards, right at the end of the 1980's and in the beginning of the 1990's, Monotype's Arial started to make more and more appearances. Because Arial shared so many characteristics of Helvetica (it's essentially a paraphrasing of Helvetica), Arial became a common replacement for Helvetica in these standards. Many people who thought they were printing Helvetica were unknowingly printing Arial, and only a trained eye could tell the difference.
Microsoft's popularity was skyrocketing (at the time an Intel PC running the reliable Windows NT 3.5 kernel was 1/2 the cost of a comparable Mac, and AMD and Cyrix PCs almost 1/3rd the cost), so their adoption of TrueType (ironically designed by Apple) - including the less-expensive Arial fonts - was a big deal. As Windows OSes took over the marketplace, Arial tagged along as the #1 Helvetica substitute for casual home users. For these new casual designers using Windows, the tagline has since became "When in doubt, use Arial."
There's still a lot of designers that look down their noses at Arial. It is, after all, a modified knock-off of one of the most widely used and revered sans-serif typefaces. Despite that, I've always felt it was an improvement. To me, Arial is a nicer, more organic looking font than Helvetica. For people with poor eyesight (which makes up a majority of the markets I design for), it's undeniably one of the best fonts in terms of legibility. Arial is also a target for anti-Microsoft zealotry, since it rode MS's coattails to popularity.
Love it or hate it, Arial is everywhere - and is probably sticking around for quite some time to come.
| "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. The overall treatment of curves is softer and fuller than in most industrial style sans serif faces. Terminal strokes are cut on the diagonal which helps to give the face a less mechanical appearance. Arial is an extremely versatile family of typefaces which can be used with equal success for text setting in reports, presentations, magazines etc, and for display use in newspapers, advertising and promotions." |
"When in doubt, use Helvetica" was one of the first lessons in page layout I was ever taught. Back when Apple and Adobe were the shiznit tag-team of design, and PostScript was the de facto page description king, I depended on Helvetica quite often. When PostScript started to wane in popularity to the numerous clones and fledgling standards, right at the end of the 1980's and in the beginning of the 1990's, Monotype's Arial started to make more and more appearances. Because Arial shared so many characteristics of Helvetica (it's essentially a paraphrasing of Helvetica), Arial became a common replacement for Helvetica in these standards. Many people who thought they were printing Helvetica were unknowingly printing Arial, and only a trained eye could tell the difference.
Microsoft's popularity was skyrocketing (at the time an Intel PC running the reliable Windows NT 3.5 kernel was 1/2 the cost of a comparable Mac, and AMD and Cyrix PCs almost 1/3rd the cost), so their adoption of TrueType (ironically designed by Apple) - including the less-expensive Arial fonts - was a big deal. As Windows OSes took over the marketplace, Arial tagged along as the #1 Helvetica substitute for casual home users. For these new casual designers using Windows, the tagline has since became "When in doubt, use Arial."
There's still a lot of designers that look down their noses at Arial. It is, after all, a modified knock-off of one of the most widely used and revered sans-serif typefaces. Despite that, I've always felt it was an improvement. To me, Arial is a nicer, more organic looking font than Helvetica. For people with poor eyesight (which makes up a majority of the markets I design for), it's undeniably one of the best fonts in terms of legibility. Arial is also a target for anti-Microsoft zealotry, since it rode MS's coattails to popularity.
Love it or hate it, Arial is everywhere - and is probably sticking around for quite some time to come.
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...And, if you noticed I used Verdana/Geneva as the font for this entry, and not Arial, a big nerdy high-five to you!
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