Wikipedia is awesome. I was looking up something about USB devices, and before I knew it, i found out all the dirty secrets of Arial font that has been suppressed from the mainstream media.

I never realized how evil the Arial font face is. I, for one, am never using it again.

Quote :

"The Scourge of Arial Arial is everywhere. If you don't know what it is, you don't use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft's influence in the world. Arial's ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It's actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, one of the most popular typefaces in the western world was Helvetica. It was developed by the Haas Foundry of Switzerland in the 1950s. ... With its friendly, cheerful appearance and clean lines, it was universally embraced for a time by both the corporate and design worlds as a nearly perfect typeface to be used for anything and everything. "When in doubt, use Helvetica" was a common rule. ... So in the early '80s when Adobe developed the PostScript page description language, it was no surprise that they chose Helvetica as one of the basic four fonts to be included with every PostScript interpreter they licensed (along with Times, Courier, and Symbol). Adobe licensed its fonts from the original foundries, demonstrating their respect and appreciation for the integrity of type, type foundries and designers. They perhaps realized that if they had used knock-offs of popular typefaces, the professional graphic arts industry -- a key market -- would not accept them. ... Around the same time, PostScript "clones" were being developed to compete with Adobe. These PostScript "work-alikes" were usually bundled with "look-alike" fonts, since the originals were owned by Adobe's business partners. One PostScript clone, sold by Birmy, featured a Helvetica substitute developed by Monotype called Arial. Arial appears to be a loose adaptation of Monotype's venerable Grotesque series, redrawn to match the proportions and weight of Helvetica. At a glance, it looks like Helvetica, but up close it's different in dozens of seemingly arbitrary ways. Because it matched Helvetica's proportions, it was possible to automatically substitute Arial when Helvetica was specified in a document printed on a PostScript clone output device. To the untrained eye, the difference was hard to spot. After all, most people would have trouble telling the difference between a serif and a sans serif typeface. But to an experienced designer, it was like asking for Jimmy Stewart and getting Rich Little. ... This, to my mind, is almost worse than an outright copy. A copy, it could be said, pays homage (if not license fees) to the original by its very existence. Arial, on the other hand, pretends to be different. It says, in effect "I'm not Helvetica. I don't even look like Helvetica!", but gladly steps into the same shoes. In fact, it has no other role. When Microsoft made TrueType the standard font format for Windows 3.1, they opted to go with Arial rather than Helvetica, probably because it was cheaper and they knew most people wouldn't know (or even care about) the difference. Apple also standardized on TrueType at the same time, but went with Helvetica, not Arial, and paid Linotype's license fee. Of course, Windows 3.1 was a big hit. Thus, Arial is now everywhere, a side effect of Windows' success, born out of the desire to avoid paying license fees. ... Despite its pervasiveness, a professional designer would rarely -- at least for the moment -- specify Arial. To professional designers, Arial is looked down on as a not-very-faithful imitation of a typeface that is no longer fashionable. It has what you might call a "low-end stigma." The few cases that I have heard of where a designer has intentionally used Arial were because the client insisted on it. Why? The client wanted to be able to produce materials in-house that matched their corporate look and they already had Arial, because it's included with Windows. True to its heritage, Arial gets chosen because it's cheap, not because it's a great typeface. --http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html "

also check out the small but passionate Arial Hater's Group.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/anti-arial/

2/19/2007 3:52:52 PM

more like death to comic sans

2/19/2007 3:53:33 PM

salisburyboy hates Arial because it's the official typeface of the j00z

2/19/2007 3:58:01 PM

^^

so you'd probably be inclined to agree with this guy

Quote :

"I had to join [the Arial Hater's] group...cuz, well...I feel ya. I never use Arial, but it's not out of hate. For me, I think, it's far too boring to be hateful. No...out here in Silicon Valley the real enemy is the Unfont of egregious ubiquity and tasteless commonality, Comic Sans. I hate hate hate comic cans more than I can tell you. Well, no that's not true - I wrote about it in January and you can check it out here. -- http://www.jasonbentley.org/blog/2005/01/righteous-hate.html "

[Edited on February 19, 2007 at 3:59 PM. Reason : ]

2/19/2007 3:58:48 PM

^^ on the contrary, i think salisburybot embraces Arialism as the last hope of the white race.

it did, after all, try to kill off the masses of european jew loving Helveticites.

2/19/2007 4:01:03 PM

2/19/2007 4:02:16 PM

Damn. its hard to believe that she's in league with the Arialists.






[Edited on February 19, 2007 at 4:04 PM. Reason : ]

2/19/2007 4:03:15 PM

Quote :

"^^ on the contrary, i think salisburybot embraces Arialism as the last hope of the white race."

well then how do you explain the fact that Israel's prime minister was Ariael Sharon? Coincidence?

Personally? I have no problem with the Arialites. It's those damned New Romaners that I really hate.

2/19/2007 4:15:08 PM

Arial
Verdana

2/19/2007 4:17:55 PM

ALL HAIL WING DINGS

2/19/2007 4:31:03 PM

i'm partial to garamond

2/19/2007 7:03:20 PM

Don't hate on sebastian though, he's chill

2/19/2007 8:23:08 PM

Times New Roman for documents

Verdana for presentations

This is pretty neat, though. I'd like to read (short) histories of other fonts.

2/19/2007 8:26:58 PM

i used courier new all through college

it looks just like times new roman, but increases length by about 30%

2/19/2007 8:43:00 PM

i hate it cause its sans serif

2/19/2007 8:44:58 PM

Areola

[Edited on February 19, 2007 at 8:54 PM. Reason : I thought this thread was about ariel sharon]

2/19/2007 8:51:20 PM

Quote :

"i used courier new all through college it looks just like times new roman, "

how do you think a fixed-width serif font looks like proportional sans-serif font? i think you need to rtfa and realize that you're exactly the font-challenged prole that the author is railing against.

2/19/2007 8:56:08 PM

Both courier and times new roman are serif fonts, but they look nothing alike.


Also, what kind of dumb nigger uses courier for anything other than code? It looks awful.

[Edited on February 19, 2007 at 8:58 PM. Reason : jlk]

2/19/2007 8:57:51 PM

courier and times new roman are both serif fonts

2/19/2007 8:58:32 PM

i think this thread is proof that wolfwebbers will argue about ANYTHING.

2/19/2007 9:58:31 PM

they will not, faggot

2/19/2007 9:59:47 PM

I see what you did there.

2/19/2007 10:01:21 PM

i was gonna continue that, but decided to not be that guy

2/19/2007 10:06:13 PM

http://www.bancomicsans.com/home.html

2/20/2007 12:11:44 AM

my bad, he said "times new roman" but i was still thinking about "arial"

2/20/2007 12:25:16 AM

wow, people still exist who don't use Garamond? jeez, get on the ball, people. Garamond is the only way to go.

2/20/2007 1:18:45 AM

i used to hate garamond.

but now that i feel its more trendy to hate Ariel, I'll have to give Garamond another look.

2/20/2007 1:34:22 AM

Calibri is pretty nice...I hadnt really seen it that I can recall until Word 2007

works well with Word's built in autospacing of characters (if you can see this in calibri and it seems a bit spaced)

[Edited on February 20, 2007 at 1:36 AM. Reason : .]

2/20/2007 1:35:30 AM