RE: Good font combination story

[Fred Ridder <docudoc -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

Ed hamonwry wrote:
 

> I don't claim to be an expert on typography, but I am a huge fan and try to
> pay attention to it. Secretly, I really want to be a graphic designer. I
> think that fonts definitely have their own personality.
> 
> Helvetica and Arial will be hard to discern differences, as Arial is
> basically Microsoft's version of Helvetica. However, you can see differences
> between Arial and Verdana, I'd call Arial a bit 'friendlier'; Verdana is
> less rounded. 
> 
> Things to look for: individual characters. How does the letter y terminate
> at the bottom (descender)? Does the letter a have the ascender or not? Are
> they tall and skinny, or wide and narrow? Are the characters mono-spaced,
> such as Courier and other typewriter-style fonts? Are the serifs short or
> long?


Your statement about Arial perpetuates several myths and is simply not correct. Arial is not Microsoft's intellectual property, even though they have distributed it (under license) with all recent versions of the Windows operating system. It is actually the IP of Monotype, who designed the face in 1982. And Arial is *not* in any sense a clone of Helvetica, although it is a sans-serif face that is very similar in weight and overall proportion to Helvetica. Arial is actually a variation of the of the Monotype Grotesque typeface that was designed for an IBM laserxerographic printer under the name Sonoran Sans Serif (the Arial name came into use when Microsoft licensed the font). But beyond the weight/proportion similarity (and the fact that line lengths/breaks stay nearly the same when switching between the two faces), there are obvious differences in the forms of quite a few letters and characters. Among the characters that are most distinctly different are: 

a, g, G, R, 1, @ (it's *huge* in Arial), and %. 

-Fred Ridder
 		 	   		  
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