RE: Good font combination story

["Leonard C. Porrello" <Leonard -dot- Porrello -at- SoleraTec -dot- com>]

And to think, some people claim scholasticism is dead!

Leonard


-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+leonard -dot- porrello=soleratec -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+leonard -dot- porrello=soleratec -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- c
om] On Behalf Of Fred Ridder
Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 2010 9:46 AM
To: hamonwry12 -at- hotmail -dot- com; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: RE: Good font combination story

Your statement about Arial perpetuates several myths and is simply not
correct. Arial is not Microsoft's intellectual property, even though
they have distributed it (under license) with all recent versions of the
Windows operating system. It is actually the IP of Monotype, who
designed the face in 1982. And Arial is *not* in any sense a clone of
Helvetica, although it is a sans-serif face that is very similar in
weight and overall proportion to Helvetica. Arial is actually a
variation of the of the Monotype Grotesque typeface that was designed
for an IBM laserxerographic printer under the name Sonoran Sans Serif
(the Arial name came into use when Microsoft licensed the font). But
beyond the weight/proportion similarity (and the fact that line
lengths/breaks stay nearly the same when switching between the two
faces), there are obvious differences in the forms of quite a few
letters and characters. Among the characters that are most distinctly
different are: 

a, g, G, R, 1, @ (it's *huge* in Arial), and %. 

-Fred Ridder



Ed hamonwry wrote:
 
> I don't claim to be an expert on typography, but I am a huge fan and
try to
> pay attention to it. Secretly, I really want to be a graphic designer.
I
> think that fonts definitely have their own personality.
> 
> Helvetica and Arial will be hard to discern differences, as Arial is
> basically Microsoft's version of Helvetica. However, you can see
differences
> between Arial and Verdana, I'd call Arial a bit 'friendlier'; Verdana
is
> less rounded. 
> 
> Things to look for: individual characters. How does the letter y
terminate
> at the bottom (descender)? Does the letter a have the ascender or not?
Are
> they tall and skinny, or wide and narrow? Are the characters
mono-spaced,
> such as Courier and other typewriter-style fonts? Are the serifs short
or
> long?
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