Arial

Whether you have typed up an essay for college, created your 10th PowerPoint for the day for your corporate job, or just simply browsed the web, you have encountered Arial. It’s a font that is truly everywhere. 

Arial is one of the most widely used fonts in the world, but today we will explore together a key question: is Arial just popular because it isubiquitous, or is it because it is truly a great font? Opinions aside, Arial has an interesting history, unique design decisions behind it, and a surprising polarization among designers.

A Brief History of Arial

The Arial font was created by Monotype Typography in 1982 as a popular typeface alternative to Helvetica. This blog only covers Sanserif or Sans-Serif fonts, and it should be clear that Arial is an original and core member of this font family. Given that its popularity rose as more and more offices and homes had computers, where it would be the default typeface, Arial quickly rose to popularity, because why leave the default? It’s not safe out there.

Jokes aside, in the early 1980s, Microsoft was gearing up for a major push into the desktop publishing market, and it needed a set of fonts for its Windows OS. Rather than licensing Helvetica from Linotype, which would mean expensive royalties, Microsoft opted to use Arial, a font that was similar to Helvetica but legally distinct and more affordable. 

After all, it was before Big Bill had Big Bills.

Designed to Be Familiar

As mentioned above, Arial is similar to Helvetica, but distinct (and lighter on a pre-billionaire's wallet). Most interesting to note, Arial has distinct differences in character shapes, most notably in the lowercase “a” and the tail of the “G”.

Key design characteristics of Arial include:

• Soft, rounded shapes 
• Slightly more humanist touches, particularly in the curves.
• Improved readability on lower-resolution screens

Arial is Popular (Because It’s Available) 

Arial's most defining features aren’t its good looks (like David Hasslehoff) — it’s its availability.

Arial is has not only been included in Microsoft products since the early ‘90s, it has been a default font for many years. Beyond that, before the widespread use of web fonts, designers had to rely on so-called ‘web-safe fonts’, because fonts could not be expected to render on all browsers. Even to this day, web designers (like myself) use what’s called a ‘Fallback font’, that way if our nice font doesn’t load automatically into the browser, you can still read awesome blogs (like this one), in good ol’ reliable ‘Arial’

Where to download Arial

1. Fonts Park - Free for personal use - click here to dowload
2. Font.Download - Free for commercial use (licensing may vary) - click here to download‍
3. Adobe Fonts - Free with license - click here to download

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