I, Helvetica
JA
May 28
First published in the Newsreel section of Meanjin Vol 69/1.
Image via i love typography
The stoush between Helvetica loyalists and lovers of Arial is well documented in typography circles—Helvetica is often regarded as the darling of the sans serifs, representing a clean, modern aesthetic and cosmopolitan attitude, while Arial is its second-rate counterpart.
To everyday users, the long history behind the feud may not be common knowledge. Yet if you were to pause a moment and look at the basic selection of fonts available in Word, you would most likely notice that Microsoft features only Arial and Macs Helvetica.
This division can be traced back to the days of Akzidenz Grotesk, a novelty typeface created in 1896 and so named because the lack of elegant serifs was, at the time, thought to be truly ‘grotesque’. During the 1950s, the typeface was used by Max Miedinger of the Haas Foundry in Switzerland as the basic template for a new design, which he in fact named Neue Haas Grotesk. Later, when Haas merged with the company Linotype, the font was fine-tuned and renamed Helvetica, meaning ‘Swiss’.
Helvetica, with its streamlined lettering and tellingly detailed spurs and tails, became one of the staple fonts of the next three decades. Hugely popular with both designers and typographers, it filtered down into the mainstream through a host of brands and businesses, such as Gap, Lufthansa, Panasonic, Xerox, the Royal Bank of Scotland and even the signs of the New York City subway. As typographer Mark Simonson wrote in his online article, The Scourge of Arial, Helvetica 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’.
Any success will, of course, generate copies, and the situation was further compounded by the advancements of desktop publishing during the 1980s. Adobe’s page description language, PostScript, was now allowing users to perform basic typesetting on their very own personal computers and, naturally, Adobe licensed Helvetica as one of their available fonts. However, Adobe also wanted to dominate the market and they decided to keep the technology that created the most superior designs to themselves. As a result, Microsoft, Apple and several other companies raced to write their own alternative programs. Around the same time, Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders of the Monotype foundry were working on another neo grotesque typeface, which would later morph into Arial, for IBM. The new font was uncannily similar to Helvetica in all but the smallest details, and as a result was a ready substitute for other PostScript clones.
By 1982, Adobe’s monopoly was cracking and when Microsoft introduced Windows 3.1, with their own version of PostScript, they decided to use Arial instead of Helvetica in order to avoid paying the licensing fee. Apple, in contrast, chose Helvetica but, as history has shown, Microsoft dominated during the 80s and 90s. As a result, Arial had its own heyday.
Today, opinions rage on all sides. Simonson has labelled Arial ‘little more than a parasite … the kind that eventually destroys the host’, while in an article by the BBC, graphic designer and fellow typographer, Neville Brody, called Helvetica ‘bland, unadventurous, unambitious’. But John Boardley, of the famed i love typography blog, felt that the whole debate was utterly pointless: ‘What it’s wrong to do is criticise Arial as a clone or rip-off of Helvetica. It’s not. If Arial is a rip-off of Helvetica, then Helvetica is a rip-off of Akzidenz Grotesk … Every face should be considered on its own merit.’
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Comments
28 May 10 at 13:39
Futura FTW.
...28 May 10 at 14:29
No self-respecting designer would use Ariel ever and would find an elegant alternative to Helvetica.
...28 May 10 at 15:40
For anyone game (or bored) enough – have a go at spotting the difference via this quiz by Ironic Sans: Arial vs Helvetica: http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/
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