Arial Font is Bullshit | Hacker News Reader

Arial Font is Bullshit

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40 pointstaitems46 comments

Arial’s R is so incredibly ugly.

Monotype should have sticked closer to the original. They are not exactly a sleazy company, so they presumably felt like they had to change a few things here and there. Other foundries were not so considerate and sold straight Helvetica knock-offs which looked exactly like the original.

Arial is not bullshit, but it sure would have been nice if Windows would have come with nicer default fonts from the beginning. Helvetica is fine, if a bit bland and old-fashioned. Yet it would not have been much of a improvement on Arial.

(Nowadays Windows is doing much better. Windows comes with quite a few seriously beautiful fonts which are optimized for usage on screen and are all original creations just for Windows. ClearType is also very good if a bit rude to the fonts. Love for typography still doesn’t seem to permeate everything Microsoft does, though. I routinely catch them using the wrong quotations marks.)

Arial has a better license than Helvetica. Ability to reuse freely is more important than intrinsic artistic value. Helvetica is the font for the rich and wealthy; Arial is the same for the rest of us.

Personally, I don't like Helvetica except in logos that start with A. (American Airlines and American Apparel have good Helvetica logos. Outside of that, though, it doesn't excite me.)

Helvetica is the font for the rich and wealthy; Arial is the same for the rest of us.

Quite. Microsoft did the world a great favour - flaws and all. Arial is The People's font, and one of these days someone cool and respected may even make a film about her.

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/family.aspx?FID=8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web#Program_...

The fonts are technically not "free" anymore.

"Helvetica is the font for the rich and wealthy; Arial is the same for the rest of us.”

I find this an intriguing proposition, considering that Helvetica was born out of the modernist movement and it’s democratic ideals whilst Arial was the commission of Microsoft, the personification of capitalism. Pretty sure there’s a liberal arts essay in the making right there.

Personally, I don't like Helvetica except in logos that start with A.

In that case you might fall in love with the logo of Finland's leading tech/economics/design college, Aalto University:

http://www.aalto.fi/en

Why can Apple afford Helvetica? Helvetica Neue? Hoefler Text? Zapfino? Ugly Gill Sans?

From Steve Job's Commencement Speech at Stanford, and on taking a class in Calligraphy:

"None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them."

It seems unlikely that except for Steve's brilliance no one would have come up with the idea that proportional typefaces might be nice on computers. They were alive and well elsewhere; it was only a matter of time before they made it into our thinking machines.

Although proportionally spaced electronic typewriters were fairly common place before the Mac. A little myth making by Mr Jobs I think.

I think it was also Steve Jobs who said: "PC screens look typewritten. Mac screens look typeset."

A college professor once gave me some great advice: "Never fall in love with a typeface."

She definitely wasn't talking about font elitism, but I think it applies there too.

I think Helvetica would be almost as reviled as Arial if it was the standard on Windows.

Maybe if Helvetica were also an attempt to re-create a classic Swiss Modernist typeface without paying licensing fees by arbitrarily making a bunch of frequently inconsistent and aesthetically questionable stroke changes, yes.

I don't think Calibri will be disliked anywhere near as much, being an original, with more of an elegant nod to classic humanist types like Frutiger rather than a passive-aggressive attempt to emulate-but-not-fully.

So what's a good Swiss Modernist typeface I should use instead of Helvetica?

This isn't so much an alternative to Helvetica as an improvement upon it, but I mention it here because some of you may like to see it.

Haas Unica: the lost successor to Helvetica, no longer available because of licensing issues, but subtly refined by the same foundry after decades of experience with the original in an attempt to create the ultimate sans serif.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bauldoff/2389110985/

Univers + Helvetica = Unica

I own a digitisation of Unica, acquired many moons ago. It is rather nice. There’s not much more to say, I’m mostly just showing off.

I like Univers[1]. If you would like something a bit more exciting have a look at the younger Frutiger[2]. Originally designed for signage (finished in 1975 for the Charles De Gaulle International Airport), but works well in other contexts, too.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univers

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger

I like Calibri, it's a refreshing font.

My biggest problem with Arial is:

  font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

Most (something like 99%?) of computers come with Arial. So, even the ones that have Helvetica installed as well, will get Arial, since its listed first. It seems like a waste to even list it in that order.

You could try:

  font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif;

Helvetica has some weird anti-aliasing issues on Windows PCs (don’t know which versions exactly) so you shouldn’t use it there anyway. Pretty much everyone using a Mac has both Helvetica and Helvetica Neue, so it’s no problem using Neue there.

Well, when I'm writing CSS, I do that. But, thats not the case for a very large majority of the sites out there online. So, I'm wondering if there's any actual reason behind Arial, rather then Helvetica being first (besides the obvious "more computers have it").

In Dreamweaver the font stacks all have Arial in front of Helvetica. So there's another reason to dislike Dreamweaver.

No reason, I guess. It doesn’t make any sense and you shouldn’t use that font stack.

For all those font elitists who disliked Arial so much they removed it from their computers.

Please don't ever do this. You are choosing a font that has known (major) anti-aliasing issues in Windows just to satisfy a small proportion of mac users. This is becoming increasingly commonplace and I don't think designers understand just how bad it looks on Windows.

Helvetica and Helvetica Neue are different font families. And, AFAIK, Windows only ships with Helvetica, not Helvetica Neue.

And I don't really consider myself a designer (at least, not a web designer), but, you're right that I didn't realize that Windows had problems displaying Helvetica.

Helvetica Neue is still available on Windows, and is very common in the design and development industry as I seem to recall a free version doing the rounds. In fact we had it for a year before we even got the official Helvetica family pack. It's not just ugly, but unreadable to a degree in Firefox.

http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-WindowsResu...

About 2 percent have Helvetica Neue installed. Not enough for me to care about them. Your mileage may vary.

Back when this was happening, was it on Windows XP by any chance? Because ClearType isn't enabled by default on XP (although it is on Vista and 7). ClearType makes a huge difference in how fonts look on Windows.

I wouldn't say a hugely positive difference. I like my fonts crisp, not hungover.

Windows doesn’t come with Helvetica Neue. (And if designers don’t test their stuff on Windows they just suck.)

Thanks, I wasn't aware of this.

If you're wondering, here's what Helvetica can look like in Windows:

http://www.nivas.hr/pub/blog-images-aa/non-aa-1.gif

It's bad enough that Microsoft ripped off Helvetica, making it look crappy on the web is downright mean ;)

Helvetica's line-height is different (or is otherwise rendered differently, vertically-speaking), so I select Arial first to keep the look consistent.

could you try:

font-family: Helvetica,"MS sans-serif", Arial, sans-serif;

Arial is great for smaller text. It's made specifically for screen text in 11px-14px range.

I love Helvetica but I think this video is bullshit.

I think the video was being satirical. "I . . . sound insane don't I?" That's what he said toward the end.

Well he did get on the front page of HN and probably a few hundred views on utube. That's whats bullshit about it really :P

He does also work for the Australian ABC and their radio network Triple J (this was probably made for JTV).

Actually, made for ABC1 the main ABC free-to-air station. Hungry Beast is supported (funded?) by Andrew Denton who still waves a reasonably sized stick around public broadcasting down under. The show probably rated in the mid 100,000s, so YouTube and HN views aren't a primary focus.

Arial isn't a copy of Helvetica. It more closely resembles the predecessor to Helvetica, Akzidenz Grotesk.

In this version of events, is the fact that Arial's kerning tables match Helvetica's exactly just an incredible coincidence?

Arial seems to have been designed as a regressive version of Helvetica, it’s like an interim step between Akzidenz and Helvetica. Non-parallel terminals being the most distinctive, also the influence of the Akzidenz cap R can be seen.

In this respect, it’s like an early design which would have been discarded in the development of Helvetica. Conceptually, designing something in such a regressive manner seems to go against the spirit of progression the modernist design of Helvetica implies.

Then use Helvetica. What's the point?

some ppl have 2 much time on their hands

And on the opposite end of the spectrum, you apparently lack the time for vowels.

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