Typeface: Arial

Six and a half years ago – was it really that long? – I reviewed a documentary on the Helvetica typeface. That reminded me that in the late 1980's typography was one of my biggest passions, alongside comics and music. It was a bigger passion than films, because those were the days before I became a film fan. In the 1990's my passion even became my job, briefly at least, when I was hired to fix faulty Unicode fonts for the printing of a new Romanian Bible.

In those days, digital fonts were expensive. I invested a lot of money in my favourite fonts. I preferred the fonts created by the company Bitstream Inc, the first company to create fonts for use by computers. Most of the fonts were reproductions of existing fonts, some in the public domain, some the property of other companies. Some were new creations. A few years later Bitstream flooded the market with fonts, giving them away as part of Corel Draw, and later as part of Word Perfect Office. For instance, Word Perfect Office 2000 contained 818 Bitstream fonts, which I still use today.

Bitstream was heavily criticised for its policy of giving fonts away. This made it difficult for other typeface companies to compete when they wanted to offer digital fonts. Why should anyone buy the typeface Palatino for $100 when Bitstream was offering an identical typeface called Zapf Calligraphic for free?

Note: there's some confusion about the use of the words Typeface and Font. Speaking metaphorically, a typeface is a family, and a font is a family member. "Arial", for example, is the family name for a general design of letters and numbers. Within this family there are variations, such as Arial Bold, Arial Italic, Arial Hollow, etc. In the traditional art of printing, different sizes were considered to be different fonts. In the computer age, different sizes are considered to be the same font.

Despite having worked briefly with fonts, I don't consider myself to be a professional typographer. It's not a subject I've ever studied. I'm a font fan. In the 1980's I used to sit staring at the letters in different typefaces, savouring the differences in style. For me, typefaces are art in its purest form. Shortly after my Helvetica documentary post I asked my readers if I should make posts about typography more often. It was a tie: one vote in favour, one vote against. I'll now finally cast my own vote, making it 2:1 in favour.

Typefaces are art, but art can be good or bad. I'm starting with Arial, a typeface I dislike, because it's the world's most commonly used typeface. Microsoft thrusts it in the face of millions of computer users, despite some severe design flaws. Click here to read about the error in Arial's capital S. I'll progress to the fonts that I like.

For each typeface I'll print samples of the most important fonts. You can click on the images to take a closer look at them. In some cases I might talk about individual letters.

I shan't write any more about Arial here, because I've written about it elsewhere.

Please leave comments on my post, especially if you're an expert in typography.