(I know there’s method to Arials madness—the terminals are slanted according to various pivot points on the letters—but that’s true for a Markov chain as well and they can still give results that seem plenty noisy.)

Jack, the grief I have with Arial I have with 215, too.

The designers’ objection, to my mind, is not the knock-off aspect, but that 215 (and 125 and 216) were never meant to work with these metrics. It’s the same objection you see to false condensing type: here, each character was stretched beyond the original’s form just so numerical targets could be reached.

To my knowledge, no formal study has been done on reader preferences toward Helvetica v. Arial.

ARIAL IS NOT A CHEAP COPY OF HELVETICA.

It’s a cheap copy of some Grotesque or other. I hear Monotype, but I don’t know for sure. Here’s an example I made up with one of the original Grotesque faces, Akidenz:
http://littlespringsdesign.com/images/blogimages/arial-akidenz.png

Thanks for the info and, especially, the civil and enlightening commentary.

You’re definitely in the minority, but I don’t think it’s an unreasoned minority. Arial is less symmetrical and more disbalanced than Helvetica–as such many find it displeasing because a string of Arial letters look malformed (to my eyes at least.)

But Arial does bring along a bit more personality than Helvetica, precisely because of the symmetry and balance issues it has. (I personally like the look of the Arial “r” because I think it’s cute in the way it’s cut in comparison to the Helvetica “r.” (Capital Helvetica “R” is much better than Arial’s “R”))

http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html

;-)

I think you raise some good points, and of course aesthetics are inherently subjective. But I think it’s also important to consider the intended use of the fonts: while (as I understand it) Microsoft mainly commissioned Arial to avoid the cost of licensing Helvetica, and therefore Arial was intended as a suitable substitute for Helvetica in all media, Arial was still developed primarily as a font for screen display, not for print.

This argument is probably stronger with Verdana than with Arial, but I think it holds for both: a lot of emphasis was given to how these fonts rendered in aliased, bitmap form at small sizes on a computer screen, perhaps moreso than how they look in high resolution and at large sizes in print. Case in point: Verdana looks good in 11-pixel height on a computer screen, but terrible in 24-point headlines in the IKEA print catalog. (All subjective, of course.)

I’m fairly indifferent to the variance between Helvetica and Arial at small sizes on-screen. When anti-aliased, Helvetica does still look a little cleaner and more polished to me than Arial, but in general I think both look fine on screen. But printed, at large sizes, the slightly “clumsy” characteristics of Arial become more apparent, especially when they’re side-by-side, as in these two signs in the parking garage at Mall of America:

http://blog.room34.com/wp-content/uploads/underdog/IMG_2282-375×500.jpg

The reaction of many designers seems to smell of elitism and subjectivism more than anything to me, but I’ll be happily proven wrong.

Are designers commonly aware of why Arial exists. I presume many designers must understand the very strong business & licensing reasons for Microsoft to have developed this typeface.

Do many designers also understand the distinctly different approach to pixel alignment in display faces, which some people prefer while others prefer Apple’s approach (I subjectively prefer Microsoft’s approach).

It’s easy to pile onto the “I hate Microsoft and everything they touch bandwagon”, but how much unbiased and objective research has been applied to the question of qualitative value to the target audience? Is an old typeface only good if it’s designed by the Swiss?

Something is stinky here. There are so many subjective factors at play while the language surrounding debate rarely recognizes those factors.

“why not?”

this is so beautiful. thank you.

Yeah I noticed that too. Now that’s ironic.