19 December 04

The Scourge of Arial

A brief history of the parasite font that dates from around 1989. There is also a sidebar highlighting the differences between Arial, Helvetica, and Monotype Grotesque 315, Arial’s ancestor.

Posted by at 07:36 PM in Design Arts | Link |
  1. How galling, to find that I’ve been indirectly had by Microsoft yet again! I’ve been choosing Arial out of the—what, seven?—fonts offered by blogger in their “compose” windows, because I like clean stripped-down fonts and because (to confess the depths of my sloth) it’s the first one in their drop-down list. I had no idea of its history.

    Blogger does an array of bewildering things with fonts—there’s a layer between the html and the viewer, apparently, that has some, ah, interesting behaviors—that have increasingly annoyed me. So much so that I may actually bite the bullet and figure out how it works.

    Thanks for spreading the word!

    — dale    20. December 2004, 08:30    Link

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