Alright, then tell us specifically what about the (to my eyes, quite minor) differences between Helvetica and Arial make the latter so much objectively inferior to the former. That is indeed what people in this thread are curious about. I confess ignorance, and I desire education.
As has been explained, Grotesque isn’t an insult in typeface nomenclature.
I’m a designer and don’t hate Arial or Times Roman, but am deathly bored with them.
Imagine if 90% of the cars on the road were 1986 Tauruses or New Beetles. They’re both well designed cars that have all necessary amenities and will carry you from home to work. But jeez, in that world the sight of a '96 Accord would be blessed relief.
Imagine all trees were either pin oaks or Douglas pines.
Imagine if 99% of bricks were medium red with either tan mortar or gray mortar.
In all those scenarios some people would never have a desire for anything else. The trees are green and the bricks solid and straight.
But for people who have become alert to other possibilities, seeing the same things constantly can be almost physically painful.
My philosophy with the typeface at hand is that it allows other more interesting things to be seen in better contrast.
If 90% of the cars were new beetles, then the remaining 10% would be pretty darned interesting. In other words, the common can become the backdrop for a few well chosen interesting elements.
(Not that I know jack about typography)
With my total lack of typographical chops, I prefer to play it safe with one nice serif and one sans—for my recent résumé I chose Adobe Caslon Pro and Helvetica. It seems to me that it is far too easy to make a mess of things with more than this.
I haven’t read all this thread, but I’m happy to mention a couple of things that I find particularly displeasing about Arial compared to Helvetica.
First, here are images of both:
Arial
Helvetica
Consider the capital R. In Helvetica, the branch point for the stem has a symmetry about the horizontal axis. In Arial, the stem comes off an an angle (and with a leading taper) that is unrelated to anything else in the font. Put an R and a B next to each other to have this really jump out. I mean, what is the tail of that “R” doing!?
Consider the lowercase e. In Helvetica, the bottom stem ends with a horizontal edge. That is, the whitespace between the e’s crossbar and the end of the stem is bounded by parallel lines. In Arial, the stem ends at some arbitrary angle. It doesn’t end on the perceived radial of the loop. It’s just arbitrary. (This is harder to see in the somewhat fuzzy-edged images linked above, but pull up a word processor and make an “e” with a big font.) Ugh.
The latter issue shows up on many letters (visually arbitrary angles). Lowercase ‘c’ is another particularly bad offender. Helvetica ends all such stems either vertically or horizontally.
I prefer Helvetica over Arial mainly because under standard font settings on the web, Arial seems a bit too thin and too closely spaced to read easily on the screen.
That’s the thing: to most design IS about those things you quoted. Your work is solely judged on whether it looks good. The only one of the three jobs you mentioned above that would be comparable is the architect. But an architect also has to deal with physical structures that may break. Among those who know how to deal with that, there is a derision for architect snobs who insist on making things look different.
And even the other professions you mentioned get the same derision for their work. Lots of people think they could defend themselves with just a couple of pointers, and many think that, with the Internet, they can find everything they need to make themselves better.
As for someone being resistant to arguments: well, if you were a professional with rhetoric, I’m sure they would say that, just because you think your arguments are good enough, doesn’t mean they actually are.
Yeah. But still, I wouldn’t mind seeing Garamond and Century used just as much as Times. There are a lot of perfectly respectable faces that can be safely substituted for Times that will make a presentation look more interesting.
To play off your user name, songs built around three major chords can be wonderful, but there’s a big wild world beyond that.
Different things are important to different individuals, but I wouldn’t be concerned about the differences you describe unless I was doing a logo or setting a headline in 48 pt. type.
In almost all other circumstance the weight of the letter or (in the case of Arial vs Helvetica) the “x” height would be a much bigger concern.
(For non-type people, “x-height” is essentially how tall the lowercase is compared to the caps.)
I’ve got a story about type faces that is only tangentially relevant here, but I’m going to tell it anyway.
At my first ad agency job in the mid-1980s the creative director (my boss) was stuck on Helvetica. Pretty much every job was set in Helvetica, and if something was set in a different sans-serif face he usually felt it looked, “fruit.”
I got sick of Helvetica, and on one of my first small solo projects I decided I was going to use something else. This was when type was set on photo paper and there wasn’t the infinite font selection available today. With some trepidation I had the type set in Gill and did the paste up.
Gill is a sans-serif face that looks sedate in its lighter weights, but looks like a novelty face in its boldest weights. When I showed it to my boss I was cringing a little because the bold headlines did look odd.
He seemed a little bothered. The piece was a flyer for a venture capital seminar that would be attended by a hundred local business owners. Including potential clients. However he was a nice guy and had given me the job, and let me have my design.
The seminar was a success and our agency sponsored another one the following year. My boss was still setting everything in Helvetica, and I decided not to cause trouble this time and ordered the type in Helvetica.
The kicker: the Helvetica looked odd. I did the paste-up, and showed it to my boss. He looked at it and told me use Gill again. It wasn’t just to be consistent, it was because we’d both become so accustomed to seeing the previous flyer in Gill that Helvetica just felt wrong for the new one.
I don’t know if that was the start of anything, but my boss slowly moved away from Helvetica over the next few years.
Oh, my God! This place is font fetish fan central!
Pfffff…Comic Sans is a poor man’s Impact.
From my mainframe days I became a big fan of Courier New because I was producing reports using SAS and then delivering them in PC software and wanted a non-proportional font for ease of formatting. It was pretty flash at the time because everyone else was getting continuous feed stuff off the system printers and I was delivering nice A4 reports.
Now that I deliver 90% of my work in Excel I am a fan of Arial because it doesn’t look stupid in a spreadsheet. Nearly every other font does. For some reason it looks even better if you set the font size to 8 rather than 10. Don’t know why but we all do it.
I wouldn’t want to say for sure without the design specs but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that those “arbitrary angles” are really cuts to the focus of the elipse that defines the letter.
Okay, this is crossing over into IMHO territory, but with all the font fetish folks here… what are good fonts to use? What are your favorites?
My problem is, I work in a world of Arial for email and Times New Roman for documents, with nothing else allowed. What do I do in order to stand out, but not too much? Helvetica? Century Schoolbook? Something else entirely?
I’d like some information on the above question as well, this is all pretty interesting.
And while I notice a lot of hatred for the default MS Word fonts and templates I wonder what the ‘font snob’ reaction is to the templates on Apple’s iWork. I never used to use the templates on Word because I thought they looked crap - but the one’s in iWork seem to be much better looking in my eyes.
And checking they use a lot of different fonts 
Here’s a good resource on pairing fonts.
Remember, I’m not a typographer, but my favorite serif is Minion. It pairs well with Gill Sans and Myriad (for sans serifs.) It has that refined look of Times New Roman, stately but not drawing attention to itself, but is not Times New Roman.
Another pairing, since I like Gill (although I know Gill is in danger of becoming the next Helvetica through overuse), is pairing it with one of Gill’s serifed typefaces, Joanna.
edit: And one more I really love, but can be hard to find, is Zuzana Licko’s Mrs. Eaves typeface. Emigre recently came out with the sans serif companion called, naturally, Mr. Eaves.
Well, yes and no. You can create a PDF of the presentation and embed the fonts you want to use. Voila, any font you want to use now available on Windows.
I can’t comment on the Arial hatred, but I know part of the reason that the over use of Times New Roman gets so much stick is because it’s designed for tiny lettering in tight columns in newpapers, not for writing business reports with.
It’s got nothing on this one.
I like Comic Sans Bold
Sans serif fonts are terrible when typing out chemical equations. It’s hard to tell capital I’s from lowercase l’s. This can be a real problem for students just learning the elements’ symbols. Comic sans should be banned from all educational materials of a higher level than comic books- it makes everything look far too cutesey and feminine, and the lower grades in the U.S. are far too estrogen-soaked as it is.
It should be illegal to print Ayn Rand or James Fenimore Cooper in anything else.
Ok, i read half this thread and saw people slagging of Arial for no real definitive reason. “Too spartan”, “inferior replica of Helvetica” and (paraphrasing) “The only way i knew a font was Arial is because it wasn’t unique” (doesn’t that make it unique?)
Are you guys art critics or what?