But as you can see by the lowercase letters, side by side, Arial’s are just a bit more condensed. Good luck if you’ve got a B, D, E, F, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, S, T U, V, W, X, Y, or Z. Otherwise, as you can see by this side by side example, the font is very difficult to tell apart to a casual observer (though some typophiles swear that Arial kerning is clunkier). (Look closer and you’ll see the rounder underside of the Helvetica G, while the Arial flattens out a bit to then turn into a hard turn for the crossbar.) If you’ve got a Capital “G” then you’re done! The Arial “G” has no spur at the bottom, the Helvetica “G” has one attached at the crossbar. And, like the city kids who go on a field trip to the farm and say, looking at the swine eating at the trough, “now you know why they call them pigs,” we’ve got people able to look at Helvetica and say “Hey, that one looks just like my Arial font.”*Ĭhecking the Difference: Look for the Tell Tales! Since more people have PCs than Macs that made Arial more popular than the “original” Helvetica. Strangely enough, Apple then standardized their font technology with TrueType also but chose Helvetica (paying Linotype’s licensing for the privilege) as their default san serif. Nearly overnight, a few million computer users had Arial as their standard san serif face. With it they got licensing for Arial instead of Helvetica (ducking the larger fee). The revolution of Arial hit its stride when MicroSoft dropped its TrueImage typeface technology and adopted the TrueType format. But instead of a rip off clone, there are distinct differences, some of which almost look like a case of “well, snip it here and it’ll be totally different” attitude. It’s very close to Helvetica in many ways, sharing the same x-height, basic proportions, and overall shape. Then a Monotype clone of the Grotesque typeface reared its head, Arial by the Birmy foundary.
By the early 1990’s font clones started marching into the universe (or should we say “Univers”?) and soon we had Hellenistic and Helios typefaces which were oh-so-close to Helvetica. Apple came out with TrueType to combat Type 3 and make some bucks as well from those artists who could tell good kerning from bad. Superior graphic artists wanted the Type 3 but had to pay the premium pricing. Guess which one Adobe kept secretly locked up in code?
Type 3 was the basic font, functional, but no high end talent. Type 1 was superior in typesetting as it came with the actual glyphs and hints to how best output each image. Then Apple came along and the arm wrestling between Type 1 and Type 3 fonts began. Suddenly, if you had a computer and a basic page layout program you had “free” fonts that used to cost big bucks. You could use Times for official looking text, Courier for business correspondence (because any secretary worth her typewriter used that face), Symbol gave you easy to use pictures (!), and Helvetica could again be the sheik of all san serifs. It was a staple to those who had access to type (or at least press type).Ī decade later, when Adobe was creating the PostScript language in the 1980’s, they picked four fonts that would become the residents of all licensed users: Times, Courier, Symbol, and of course, Helvetica. It didn’t call attention to itself, it became whatever word, phrase, or paragraph you set. The saying became “when in doubt use Helvetica” for a safe answer when a serif-less face was needed. Machine-made, plastic-like, and form follows functional.īut, like Tekton would in the late 1990’s, it had grown stale to the designers of the 1970’s.
The space age soon cemented Helvetica (and new weights added when Haas merged with Linotype) as the premier cosmopolitan font, free of extraneous serifs or any human imperfections. Created by the Haas Foundry, it was quickly adopted as the “new modern and clean” typeface of the corporate world. Helvetica was born in Switzerland in the 1950s. Especially helpful when needing to match an existing. Here’s a few hints to keeping them separate in your mind (and monitor). Two reasonably good san serif fonts that are often mistaken for one another.