Friday, October 02, 2009

arial or helvetica

I'm sure I'd never have been able to tell the difference between these sorts of thing a few years ago, but you do learn a few interesting things during a career in publishing. As everyone should know, the font 'Arial' is basically just a shit version of 'Helvetica' - the differences are small but important.

If you think you can tell them apart, try this quiz. I got 8/10, which isn't bad.

Arial or Helvetica?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

true.

But Helvetica is used everywhere all the time. Does Mr Helvetica get royalties every time someone types his creation out?

My fave at the moment is Amasis - http://www.fonts.com/findfonts/SearchPage.htm?kid=Amasis

Jonathan said...

The funny thing is that you can hardly tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica at first. But once you get good at spotting the differences (top of the letter t, tails on some letters) the inferior design of Arial really stands out. Depressing that an inferior design can dominate just because of the corporations who throw their weight behind it.

Anonymous said...

I can't tell the differences on the capital letter examples though.

Jonathan said...

Nor me! That's where my score fell over.

Nigel Evers said...

Hmm. They look the same to me :-(