As a still-budding font nerd and snob, I’m painfully aware of the problems surrounding Comic Sans MS, that infamous “fun!” font packaged with every PC on the planet. But I’m here to tell you of another eyesore: Arial.
Mark Simonson wrote a great little piece on Arial versus Helvetica – the latter being the font Arial only wishes it could be. Since I read that and the accompanying How to Spot Arial, I’ve noticed that, damn, this font really is everywhere. I can understand why: it’s simple, it’s clean, it’s straig… ah, it’s because it’s a default.
But man, once you see the two compared? Arial looks like poop.
So I implore you to help out your friends and neighbors who know Arial. Introduce them to other fonts freely available on the web and show them how to use ’em. We’ll have a nicer-looking world because of it.
Posted in Just Plain Odd, Miscellaneous
Merle October 4, 2007, 11:37 pm
Arial is vile. For headings and the like, yeah, that’s okay, but many studies over decades have shown that non-serifed fonts are much harder to read than serifed fonts.
And yet it is the default just about everywhere. _sigh_