Comments on: Reconsidering Arial

By: John

John — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:06:55 +0000

I’m surprised to not see your article referenced in the following just publishing piece on anti-aliasing: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/11/02/the-ails-of-typographic-anti-aliasing/

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:00:18 +0000

Helvetica Māori – I like it! I must have dodged that bullet by ~~escaping~~ leaving New Zealand right at the beginning of my design career.

By: John

John — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 05:21:38 +0000

Although aesthetically spot on in your preference for Helvetica Neue, you may not be aware Jonathan that chocolate chip Helvetica was a conscious reworking by Linotype in 1983 of the vanilla favourite to standardise its heights and widths, and also includes improved legibility, heavier punctuation marks, and increased spacing in the numbers (thanks Wikipedia).

And on a Mac, I’ve yet to ever have a system problem caused by Helvetica Neue, but I’ve had plenty by corrupted versions of its grumpy older brother—most notoriously the hacked for macrons “Helvetica Māori”, which is perpetually doing the rounds in NZ design studios.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 05:05:48 +0000

@Ivan – I think it’s generally safe to place Helvetica first in your font stack, because Helvetica is not a system font on PC, so most people wouldn’t have it installed. But as you suggest I err on the side of caution and put Arial first!

Like (I suspect) most designers I use a version of Helvetica named ‘HelveticaNeue LT Std’ rather than plain old Helvetica, but the few times I’ve had vanilla Helvetica activated I notice right away how fugly every second webpage looks.

By: Ivan

Ivan — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:43:34 +0000

This really makes me rethink my typical font stack I’ve been using by habit. I’m thinking it should now be Arial,Helvetica for body and then Helvetica,Arial for headings.

My rule of thumb is I don’t use anything less then 11px for the web, so the smaller sizes don’t bother me too much. But seeing my workhorse 11px looking so poor is pretty eye-opening.

My other rule of thumb regarding Helvetica is to see what Khoi Vinh – who loves himself some Helvetica – is doing on subtraction.com. I promise I checked this after coming up with the above rule, but he uses Arial,Helvetica for body text and Helvetica,Arial for headings. Nice!

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:44:57 +0000

@Og2t – I upgraded my Safari install in the process of researching this post, and made the same discovery. I can understand why Apple made this decision, because they received a lot of flack for trying to crowbar the look/feel of the Mac OS into the Windows environment, but I think it’s a shame because it was a real point of difference in Safari. The power user will know that this is a user configurable preference, but the average user will be none the wiser.

By: Og2t

Og2t — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:48:23 +0000

I am not sure but I think the recent Safari 4 reverted back to use ClearType by default…

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:57:30 +0000

@John – Thanks for the link. I hadn’t read Joel’s article before, but I am familiar with the debate about which rendering engine is “better”. I am one of those Windows users who, upon first firing up Win/SF3, had an “ewwww, the fonts look blurry” moment. But of course it’s all a matter of what seems most familiar. I admit that Apple’s approach has grown on me – blurry or not, it’s nice to see fonts rendered the way the type designer intended.

By: John

John — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:41:31 +0000

Nice post Jonathan. Found an interesting article by Jole Sposky on the differences between the Microsoft and Apple font rendering engines, which he attributes to being mainly a difference in philosophy, namely “form” vs “function”: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html