February 22, 2001
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The Scourge of Arial
Mark Simonson has put together an entertaining and historically punctuated article on just how this nefariously ugly cousin of a typeface came to be stuck in our collective font menu.
“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.”
In cahoots with Monotype? Be sure to read the sidebar article entitled Monotype’s Other Arials for details on just how blatantly Microsoft was in trying to avoid paying the higher licensing fees for existing typeface designs. Reading this piece was like travelling back to my first couple of years working as a typeface designer and technical specialist. Back when it was still called Royal at Apple, TrueType shook up a lot of companies, ours included. All of a sudden, we needed to support this new format, convert our libraries, and (gasp) probably even purchase an Intel powered box to support the emerging Windows-based publishing market. We all knew that Windows 3.1 was going to be big, so it made sense to go along for the ride. To be honest, we didn’t want it to be big, but we couldn’t ignore it either.
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