Which are the main characteristics of many, far better designed, sans serif fonts.
Now that’s a juicy factoid, and you may be right. Although ‘gothic’ was meant to indicate coarseness as a comparison with ‘Roman’ (serifed) - see Goths vs Romans.
I’ve been working with type for over 40 years . . . and most of those years, exclusively with type. The two font families I never ever use are Helvetica and Times. Rather than “elegance and beauty,” what I see are monotony and total lack of character (pun intended).
I once had a job in which one of my duties was to identify fonts sent in by clients. In order to ID a font, you look for certain characteristics that show a font’s individuality. In some fonts it could be the lower-case “g” or “y”; in others it could be the cap “Q” or “R”. But occasionally I’d see a font with absolutely no identifying characteristics whatsoever . . . no characters that showed anything unique to that font. When that happened I knew it was Times Roman.
And by the way, the best thing I can say about Ariel is that it’s not identical to Helvetica.
And as far as popularity is concerned: I don’t care whether or not a font is popular; that neither adds nor detracts from its esthetic value. But what I don’t like about certain fonts is that they are a default. Many people choose them by not choosing, only because they’re there.
I love the fact that we can have serious, intense discussions about fonts here. 
I like arial just fine. Sometimes I choose a different font for a slightly different look, but when I want sans-serif for just screwing around, arial is okay by me. Next you people will be telling me that I shouldn’t use Times New Roman, either, when I want a font for readability.
I used to not really notice the difference between Helvetica and Arial
Then I watched “Helvetica”
…Now Arial screams out at me “Cheap Imitation!”
It is very easy to distinguish the two. Look at a lower-case “t” and you will see a slanted top in Arial.
In addition, as already mentioned, the swooping leg on the Arial R is quite different from the more vertical Helvetica R leg.
One final point, and the most obvious: the ends of letters like c, e, and s are cut on an angle in Arial, while they are perfectly horizontal in Helvetica.
I like Helvetica. It provides a non-distracting background for the content, known by all, and aesthetically pleasing.
When I prepared my resume a few weeks back, I did the headings in Helvetica on my Mac—I would be shocked if some font geek would actually spot the difference and smile because I didn’t use Arial.
Yes, it depends on the typographer and their own artistic vision. My experience is that most I’ve worked with have a healthy respect for both these fonts. I (not a typographer, but a visual artist) personally think Helvetica is the most beautiful sans serif, although my serifed preferences are to Minion in terms of elegance. The only minus I see for Helvetica is the fact that it is, indeed, everywhere. To me, that’s not lack of character. It’s more “familiarity breeds contempt.”
I think that Arial is a perfectly cromulent font, not that I really pay that much attention. I didn’t even notice that my copy of Word 2007 doesn’t include Helvetica. (and helvetica isn’t in the Firefox spellchecker…)
I guess I’m missing something. I found an article on how to spot Arial versus Helvetica and didn’t see anything there that would make me prefer either. The fact that Arial is included with many PCs makes it a better choice for me.
The example above with Richard III will likely make me switch to Verdana as my default choice.
I’mnot sure that “better designed” in this context doesn’t just mean “I like it better”. That is, I can see prefering the flat top on the lower case t or prefering the slant. I don’t see “better” for either.
I think a lot of it comes down to the typesetting. Most of these ubiquitous fonts became commonplace through Microsoft Word, whose setting used to render even beautiful fonts hideous (and still does to some extent). As a result, Arial and Times New Roman were almost guaranteed to be seen in the least flattering light. Stick it in a proper typesetting program, and Arial doesn’t look so bad. It still doesn’t look attractive to me, but I think that’s mostly because my brain automatically associates it with crappy Word documents.
The funny thing is, for all the accusations of it being a cheap knock-off of Helvetica, there were many much closer knock-offs around (identical copies, practically). There’s no protection in US law for type designs, as I understand it; only their trademarked names. But for whatever reason, Monotype decided they wanted to make their Helvetica clone more distinct; perhaps precisely to distinguish themselves from the cheap knock-off merchants. So arguably it’s one of the more honourable Helvetica-alikes.
Not so in this case. It’s a combination of things (and nothing really to do with whether the letter t slopes or not). It’s as much about the letterspacing as the shape of the characters themselves. The hardest part of font design is working out how all the letters ‘fit’ together. Poorly designed, and you get awkward spaces – something you can easily adjust in a headline, but not if you’re setting a 100 page annual report.
Hate to pull rank here, but one of my biggest bugbears is that anyone with access to Photoshop or more than one typeface thinks they know about graphic design. You wouldn’t argue with an architect or a lawyer or a doctor, but everyone feels they can be a designer. There’s some very experienced professional designers here, myself included, but you seem resistant to professional arguments. Design is not about ‘I think it looks okay, so it’s good’ or ‘I can’t tell the difference so you’re just being subjective’.
I certainly am not resistant to professional arguments unless you mean “I’m a professional, defer to me.” But in this thread, most of the arguments have been subjective. “Cheap imitation”, statements that there are “many, far better designed, sans serif fonts”, etc. are not professional arguments. A professional argument would be a link to a website where fonts can be seen side by side with notes. When I found something similar showing how to tell Arial from Helvetica, I didn’t see anything that wasn’t subjective preference.
Perhaps the reason people might argue with a graphic designer versus a doctor has to do something with licensing and board certifications.
Out of curiosity, what typefaces were used on your diploma?
Man, I was way off. I thought it meant a new king of Illinois had been crowned.
I did my last resume in Century Schoolbook…and actually had 2 people ask about the font (!)
Damn, you were until now like my favorite poster 
I gather that’s a daily complaint from some Chicagoans.
Helvetica hater here, I much prefer Arial.
Helvetica wants to be minimalist and spartan, but insists on putting this annoying little essence of a curl on many letters (e.g. R, a). It’s like a middle-manager telling me to put slide-transitions into my powerpoint presentation to “spice it up a little”.
The term "grottesque’ does come from the 1480s discovery of Nero’s Domus Aurea (which they characterized as grottoes) which was a nice source of new motifs for artists, and the word migrated a lot over time, obviously.
Well, interestingly, we were instructed to do our dissertations in Courier – a mono-spaced ‘typewriter’ font – because it was deemed to be a piece of writing not design and our professor didn’t want us to be marked up or down for our typesetting.
Of course this was over 20 years ago when designers doing their own typesetting was not yet a professional reality, I’m sure it’s changed now. Heck, when I started working, I had a drawing board and a typescale.
Nobody has mentioned the most important thing about Arial: it’s the only sans-serif font a presenter can be sure will be on whatever Windows PC he has to use to give a presentation.
If you don’t know what machine you will be using, such as if you are visiting and have to use whatever they offer you to project your work, you can count on Arial for sans-serif proportional, and Times New Roman for serif proportional, and Courier New for nonproportional, and Symbol for Greek letters and other things that are missing from the others (the distinction between font and typeface and character sets would have been helpful while all these were being developed). This pretty much has to be your toolset unless you take extraordinary measures like freezing all your information into graphics files. If you stray from this, you may find some of your more obscure characters actually changing into something else when Windows translates your work into something it can show.
What about Buffied? Are we all agreed that it’s one of the best fonts available? 