Helvetica vs. Arial Quiz | Hacker News Reader

Helvetica vs. Arial Quiz

ironicsans.com

15 pointsalanthonyc31 comments

First, thanks to mingyeow for submitting this link:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=839407

I scored 19 out of 20. All caps Mattel did me in. However, one bad thing is that I can now see just how bad Arial is compared to Helvetica and it's very annoying.

I really wasn't looking for something else to be anal-retentive about.

Yeah, that and Toyota were really hard to tell. Anything with a lower-case t, a or r; or an upper-case C were very obvious, and that was most of them.

For Toyota you can tell with the 'o'. Helvetica appears like an almost perfect circle, Arial is more oblong and oval-shaped.

I thought so too, but when I compare them side-by-side, it's not as obvious:

http://img87.yfrog.com/i/picture5da.png/

... and it turns out Toyota modified their O's, and what they wound up with is actually Helvetica with Arial-like O's.

Ha. I feel so much better now! ;)

19/20 here. North Face got me, but in retrospect the R should have tipped me right off.

Helvetica is a clearly superior typeface, and I'm not just saying that to be cool.

Same for me, got all of them except Mattel. Very interesting to see so many top brands use Helvetica in their logos.

I also got all of them except Mattel. :/

20/20. Mattel, North Face, and Toyota were tricky.

The hint book: terminals in Helvetica are always straight, and Helvetica has slightly more uniform strokes. In uppercase, C and G are good tip-offs; in lowers, 't' is a dead giveaway.

Look again at the two 3M logos if you want to see why designers hate Arial so much.

The 'C' and the 'R' in Crate&Barrel pisses me off too.

Lowercase R, C, A, and E are also pretty easy giveaways. I don't use MS Office so I lack Helvetica, but it's still quite easy to pick out against Arial.

I distinguished between them because most of the helvetica ones look fuzzy for some reason

Note: You can click on the images instead of the little radio controls to select your answer. Wish I had noticed that sooner.

Mattel and Toyota got me.

And I found 3M to be absolutely hilarious. Next time someone asks me why Helvetica is better than Arial, that'll be my example.

In fairness to Arial, the numbers in lots of faces are not as well-thought-out as the letters. "3M" is a bit of a worst-case scenario.

20/20 is pretty good for someone who's been accused of not caring what font was used so long as it's fixed-width and readable.

I actually do have my list of fondest fonts; my current font lust is http://www.clearviewhwy.com/

At $795.00 I really cannot justify the investment to myself, but it would be nice to use the optimized for legibility fonts for display text.

Aha! Glad to discover the name for the new font along the Beltline in Madison, WI: http://www.dot.wisconsin.gov/opencms/export/nr/modules/news/...

Ha, it's ironic that they use crappy looking rasterized text images for navigation on a site trying to sell a premium font: http://clearviewhwy.com/_images/snav_01_LV-01/01_over.gif

20/20. I've definitely gained a new respect for Helvetica and a hatred towards Arial after seeing a few of those (3M mainly).

I failed on Toyota. :(

The rest are easy; Helvetica wants every line to have a straight ending, Arial doesn't.

The Mattel logo has all straight lines too.

I think the correct analysis for this case is that Helvetica has proportional line widths for vertical and horizontal lines.

I got that on the fact that helvetica's capital A's are tighter, which I think came through better in Mattel than in Toyota. Since then I've also learned that Helvetica's capital O's are almost perfectly round.

The line weight on "M" stays consistent in Helvetica, but it shits the bed in Arial, getting way thicker at the "V" junction.

19/20. Mattel kicked my ass.

Now let's see a 3-way quiz between Helvetica, Arial and Akzidenz Grotesk!

Akzidenz is even easier to spot than Arial. A showdown between Akzidenz and Arial would be hard.

18/20. Everything but Mattel and Toyota. I didn't know Arial was so ugly before taking this.

20/20 - Arial has a lot of odd oblique angles on characters like "3", "r", "G", etc. where Helvetica has horizontal or vertical lines. Toyota was tricky, though.

20/20

To tell on Mattel, look at the kerning. See how tight the T and the E are in Arial compared to in Helvetica. The A also looks slightly too far left.

18/20 - Didn't look at the letters at all, just looked at which one had fuzzier edges, and was therefore likely run through Photoshop more.

All the Arial bashing is rather boring. Which designer is using Arial over Helvetica when designing logos? Of course Helvetica is the superior choice if those are the only two typefaces that can be used.

I dare say most people use Arial on a computer screen, and the only way you're going to tell Arial and Helvetica apart is to use a huge font size. That would be a real test.

BTW, I scored 19/20.

Toyota got me!

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