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So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica?
- MrBra 14y agocan you tell a green field..
- faramarz 14y agoIf you know what you're looking for, the test is fairly easy. It get's tricky in case of ALL CAPPS that don't include the letter 'R'. I got MATTEL wrong.
- jongold 14y agoRuining the game for everyone; two things I love about Helvetica — Terminals at right angles to the stroke. http://c.jon.gd/image/3Q0y2u323j3C http://c.jon.gd/image/3Q0y2u323j3C . Arial looks particularly sloppy with jaunty terminals. It is possible to have a similar grotesque sans-serif feel with offset terminals (see Univers & Akzidenz Grotesk) but they're a crucial part of what give Helvetica its character. - The uppercase R. Has a really strong leg compared to Arial's half-assed flaky leg.
- visarga 14y agoI immediately got 17/20, missing only the ones where there were no lower case characters. How do you distinguish between in these 3 cases? http://imgur.com/a/NOLoI http://imgur.com/a/NOLoI
- stevanl 14y ago1) Completely round O = Helvetica 2) The C's. Helvetica = flat endings not slanted 3) Like a perfectly round O, the M's have more of a squarish spacing
- dlitz 14y agoHmm. I see a completely round O in "TOYOTA", but not in "THE NORTH FACE". Is it just me?
- aikn 14y agoKerning. If there's more uniform spacing between all letters in one picture it should be the original: "OTA" in Toyota, "THE" in The North Face and "TEL" in Mattel. But it would be hard without seeing them both at the same time.
- callum85 14y agoA thing that helps me distinguish them is that Helvetica is a bit more decorative with some of the capitals, like G and R. I think the Arial designers were probably trying to make it "even more Helvetica than Helvetica", by simplifying the flourishey/decorative bits, like the bottom thing on a G and the curvy bit at the top of the slanty line of the R. (These are the proper typographical terms, btw.)
- publicfig 14y agoIn Toyota, the O is the most round one. The R in North Face is the easiest tell there. In Mattel, you can see that the E has more balance with the rest of the letters.
- mhitza 14y agoArial's A has a wider base (seems more "fat") than Helvetica's
- drivers99 14y agoThe "C" (flat terminals) and "R" (straight vs not straight) in the THE NORTH FACE are different.
- keithpeter 14y agoNicely done. I got most of those wrong! Which is why I leave typography to typographers. Suggestion: wrong response page has a small graphic that emphasises a difference between Arial and Helvetica. e.g. the shape of the top part of the lower case r, &c Then you have a teaching tool...
- ef4 14y agoI really don't consider myself a typography expert or designer, but I found that easy and got a perfect score. There are obvious tells in almost all of them -- mostly lowercase "s", "c", etc, in which Helvetica is has perfectly level edges and arial is angled. The only harder ones are some of the all caps examples like TOYOTA.
- reidmain 14y agoThat is almost the exact experience I had. I got 17/20 and the ones I screwed up all had capital letters. I couldn't see any difference between Mattel and Toyota.
- Alexx 14y agoMattel is the genuinely incredibly close, the 'Y' in Toyota is the obvious tell if you've spent a while looking at Helvetica though.
- breakall 14y agoFun test! Mattel was also the one that tripped me up. As the GP said, the caps on the S, C, T, etc were usually the giveaways. The flourish at the bottom right (not sure the correct term) of the R in TARGET gave me at moment's pause. But each of the logos was customized to an extent.
- etfb 14y agoI realised it must be Helvetica because of the "R". I reasoned thus: I am more familiar with Arial than Helvetica, and I'm sure I would have seen that "R" before if I were spending a lot of time with it because it's just so ugly, so since I didn't recognise it, it must be Helvetica. And I was right. It's funny, because I universally prefer Helvetica over Arial otherwise.
- etfb 14y agoThe perfectly round "O" was the giveaway for me. Helvetica just feels more "literal" to me, if that makes any sense, with its perfectly horizontal endings on "C" and "S" and "t", so the round "O" seemed more likely. Mattel nearly tripped me up too, but I noticed that Helvetica was bolder throughout than the Arial equivalent, so it wasn't hard.
- quarterto 14y agoYes. Yes I do. 19/20, and the one I got wrong was Mattel.
- Alexx 14y agoYeah, the Mattel one was the only one that wasn't instantly obvious. Just happens to have the only few letters in Arial and Helvetica that are actually comparable. 3M was the funniest, looks shocking in Arial.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- speeder 14y agoI am a designer (I mean, actually I am a coder that for some freaking bizarre reason got a design degree), and got a 19/20. For "Mattel" my choice ended being random.
- jspiros 14y ago20/20. Mattel was the only one I was uncertain of, but the correct answer was slightly blurrier, due to it probably being an actual logo copy scaled down or up slightly, as opposed to a "freshly-made" duplicate for the purpose of the test. Toyota was easy enough, as the capital "O" in Helvetica is more oval than round in Arial, and more round than oval in Helvetica. I'm not a designer, I'm a developer, but I do enjoy typography.
- chaosfox 14y agoI found all of the correct answers slightly blurry, I got 18/20 without looking at any letters.
- skoob 14y ago> the capital "O" in Helvetica is more oval than round in Arial, and more round than oval in Helvetica. The Os in the Toyota logo have been modified and made more round, though. This is what "TOYOTA" looks like in plain Helvetica: http://myfonts.us/td-RQ1hNh http://myfonts.us/td-RQ1hNh The Os in the Arial and Helvetica are practically identical.
- Yver 14y agoI just picked whichever looked better and got 18/20. Failed on Crate&Barrel and Mattel.
- SifJar 14y ago18/20, and I'm no design/typography expert. As others have said, it was on capitals. But the point of the site is clearly to show people can't tell the difference, and I can.
- PetitPrince 14y agoI'm no designer nor typographer and got a 16. I felt that most of the time the Helvetica variant was heavier (as in, more bold) most of the time. I had no idea of the different R and of the right angled stroke.
- SquareWheel 14y agoIf you just pick the fuzzier looking image you'll get the majority of them. Very neat idea though.
- calinet6 14y agoYes, the differences are easy to see, as everyone has said. But the important part is that there's a difference in feel and theme that's not really measurable and identifiable in direct comparison. The subtle difference is far more important than trying to identify the tiny details that don't really matter. And in that sense, this game (while fun and interesting) misses the point.
- visarga 14y agoI don't feel this subtle difference. Take a look: http://imgur.com/CWJWvZk http://imgur.com/CWJWvZk Does this feel different? I can see the slanted Arial terminations but I don't "feel" the different mood.
- cliffbean 14y agoHypothesis: The difference in feeling that some people get from fonts is like the difference in feeling many people get when they pay a lot for the wine they drink. It's subconscious. It feels like a real feeling. It just isn't driven by the actual experience of the product. In the wine world, it is possible to isolate this effect using blind taste tests. In the font world, there seems to be no robust way to show a font expert Helvetica without letting them recognize that it's Helvetica.
- visarga 14y agoOr like Stradivarius in classical music. There have been blind tests when a contemporary violin was mistaken for the Strad. Yet classical musicians still covet the Strad - my theory being that it makes people listen with this subconscious effect you've been talking about. Same sound, but if we believe it comes from a Strad, it seems better.
- ricardobeat 14y agoI don't think that analogy stands. You can tell there's something different between them, specially on a full page of text, without knowing what typeface it is at all. Helvetica is slightly more elegant. That said, it is no surprise that it's hard to tell the difference since one is a rip-off of the other.
- uptown 14y agoYes - 19/20 Botched Mattel
- gotoY 14y agoGood idea to call the images foo-helvetica.gif & foo-arial.gif. :)
- navs 14y agoNow now, that's cheating :)
- sp332 14y agohttp://typewar.com/ http://typewar.com/ quizzes you on letters from an increasing number of fonts, and scores you according to how many other people got a particular matchup correct. They also have "quests" that focus on a particular challenge, including Arial vs. Helvetica. http://typewar.com/quests/ http://typewar.com/quests/ I think my favorite part of the site is the statistics on how many people are confused by particular matchups.
- chris_wot 14y agoIt's the "r" that's usually the give away. However, I would have to say that the capital "S" is also a giveaway, and the I'd have to say that the letters with Helvetica are somewhat fatter...
- andrelaszlo 14y agoThat was easy. I read this article about a year ago and once you've seen it, you can't unsee it :) http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html
- rkjaer 14y ago20/20 - a few hard ones though. Fun quiz :)
- neya 14y agoThis one is fairly easy simply because they show you a comparison. In reality, if they showed you only one type of font and if they had asked you to identify which font it was (Arial or Helvetica), then it would have been a REAL challenge :)
- andrelaszlo 14y agoThe bad kerning gives it away on more than one occasion (American Apparel for example).
- andrelaszlo 14y agoYou can clearly see the black brush on the almost black background in the SCOTCH logotype :D
- guessWhy 14y agoI used the following heuristics (some parts added afterwards): 1. Helvetica has level edges, Arial is angled (as ef4 said). Particularly important were "t", "e" and "a", "S", "G", C". 2a. For capital letters, if there is an "R", the Helvetica one is curved in the bottom right part while Arial uses a straight line. 2b. For a capital "Y", the Arial one has the same length in all directions while the Helvetica one is shorter at the bottom. (Alexx indicated a difference). 2c. The jags/gaps in the capital "M" extend further to the top for Arial. This can be used to figure out MATTEL. 3. Otherwise, the one that looks fatter is Helvetica.
- klrr 14y agoHaha, fun test, got 14 of 20 right!
- adieulot 14y agoI noticed that I can do pretty good just by quickly detecting which one is the most unfamiliar font, as I am and always have been on Windows.
- mambodog 14y agoThe MATTEL one was hard, but I just assumed the one with crappy kerning was Arial, and sure enough...
- ruswick 14y agoThe thing that gave away the Mattel logo was the E. Apparently, the middle bar of the capital E in Arial is not equidistant from the outer bars, whereas the E in Helvetica has equally-spaced bars. (Or legs, or whatever the hell they are.) This was just something I noticed for the first time while going through.
- kalleboo 14y agoI got about 50/50 but got bored and gave up after 16 so I don't know my score. I don't stare at small details on fonts normally like people here do, so I mostly tried to pick which one looked "right".
- fbomb 14y agoI got 17 out of 20. I just picked the ones that looked better to me.
- J2K 14y agoFun test. Also if anyone's interested in Helvetica or typesetting in general just watched a pretty good documentary recently that got me more interested in the topic: http://www.helveticafilm.com/ http://www.helveticafilm.com/, also available on netflix: https://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Helvetica/70076125 https://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Helvetica/70076125 Sorta similar to the 'Objectified' doc that was recommended by HackDesign but I actually liked this one better.
- richbradshaw 14y ago19/20 Mattel was impossible!
- Swizec 14y agoAs a programmer I got 11/20, so juuuust slightly better than random guessing. And I was trying so hard too!
- supercanuck 14y ago10/20 - I'm a complete failure.
- ianstallings 14y agoI got through about 15 questions, had flash backs to the documentary "Helvetica" where it's just never ending stream of examples for 1 1/2 hours and couldn't take anymore. I'll take your word for it.
- kunai 14y agoHa, I remember taking this test quite a while back when I was obsessed with typography. Took it again and got a 18. In terms of the actual font design, Helvetica always felt more "natural" and "composed," whereas Arial always felt much more focused on pure readability.
- paltman 14y agoCheck out http://typewar.com/quests/quest/1/ http://typewar.com/quests/quest/1/
- nvr219 14y agoI got 15/20. What I learned from this quiz is I actually prefer the lowercase S in Arial.
- Nux 14y ago"You answered 18 out of 20 questions correctly." I didn't even know the difference between the two until today (can't be bothered with fonts and suchlike).
- rgo 14y agoMissed American Airlines. But I think it actually looks more balanced with Arial, the original feels a bit squeezed.
- cgmorton 14y agoI played a different game called 'which one appeals to me more on first glance'. I ended up with a perfect 10/10 split. Could it be that different fonts will be more aesthetically pleasing for different uses? Even if they're typographically similar??
- paul_f 14y agoI picked the one the "looked" better and got 5 out of 20 right. Guess I just prefer Arial.
- ruswick 14y agoI only missed one, which was do to negligence and not ignorance. Moreover, I'm not even cursorily trained in design or typography. This doesn't seem that hard. Any perceptive person can determine the differences immediately through deduction and use them to differentiate throughout the test.
- Tyr42 14y agoI knew nothing about typography, guessed the first one with a lowercase r right, used that to get the rest of the lowercase ones. I only failed the uppercase ones. 16/20
- wging 14y agoA much more interesting question than "Arial or Helvetica" would be: "Which one looks better?" Then you could ask how well the answer correlated with Helvetica vs Arial. This question is good for seeing whether people know what they're looking at, but the point of using one font over the other isn't to show you prefer the 'correct' font, but to be invisibly better than other choices in one way or another.
- asynchronous13 14y agoI know nothing about design and typography. I went through the quiz and simply asked myself, "which logo do I like better?". I got 17/20 correct with that method.
- brudgers 14y agoThe problem is that there was a lot more effort put into the originals than their knockoffs in Arial. The originals were produced with a designed typeface - and typefaces are tweeked for size. The Arial knockoffs obviously used scaled up versions in several cases. The knockoffs didn't get the same attention to kerning either.
- HSO 14y agoIt would be interesting to see how purportedly "design-conscious" people performed without the immediate feedback and the juxtapositions. Also, since these are logos, aimed at gut feelings, the test should be timed, e.g. you must answer within 1 sec or so.
- bhauer 14y agoFun short game. Enjoyed it! I got 19/20. Messed up on "STAPLES" because I got over-confident and started selecting too quickly by the end. The easiest way to distinguish the two, in my opinion, is that Helvetica uses horizontal cuts to letter strokes. So I should have seen that the capital 'S' in STAPLES had slightly off-axis cuts in my selection. Perhaps what tricked me is that the STAPLES logo itself is off-axis.
- gulbrandr 14y agoOne service that I like from this site is the shorter thesaurus [0]. You enter a long word and receive shorter synonyms. [0] http://www.ironicsans.com/thsrs/ http://www.ironicsans.com/thsrs/
- moostapha 14y agoTerrible test. I got 19/20 based entirely on knowing what the original logos looked like on a few of them (Agfa and DEC, mostly). I thought I'd fail because I've never paid attention to those fonts. If it was done with novel text, the results would have been different.
- pwthornton 14y agoToo bad this test isn't a higer DPI. It's easier to tell the differences, and see the subtleness of Helvetica at higher DPIs. Helvetica is a font designed for print, but it also looks good on HiDPI/Retina displays. On my Retina MacBook Pro this whole test is a blurry mess. I had to bring it over to my non-Retina display to take it. But the differences between Arial and Helvetica pop a lot more on a better display.
- efnx 14y agoI found the giveaway is in lowercase t, s, c and uppercase R. Helvetia tries to snap most terminating edges horizontally.
- aidos 14y agoThis is a question that's close to my heart. As a developer I've spent inordinate amounts of time getting Helvetica working properly in websites. I can tell the difference between them, it's obvious when you know what to look for. Is it so much better that it's worth the effort required? Definitely not in my opinion. I have a special place reserved in Hell for that font.
- tlrobinson 14y agoI didn't initially know all the obvious differences, but I picked the one that looked "right" or "better" and still got 16/20. After reading tip offs here I got 19/20 (all except Toyota)
- EEGuy 14y agoNo typographer nor designer here either, but _subjectively_ speaking: * This test quickly 'clued me in' that a logo should give a "commanding", "authoritative", "brooks no argument" look. Helvetica, yes; Ariel, no: Ariel made some logos look downright self-satirical. * An email client I use has Ariel as its default font. In that (two-way communication) context, where accidental antagonisms can arise, Ariel seems to "look less antagonistic" * So this test speaks to me about appropriate fonts for two different contexts, and personal point-of-view. * Got 20/20, but might not on a 2nd run. I'm only human.
- crntaylor 14y agoNot a criticism, but I'm genuinely confused about the persistent misspelling of 'Arial' as 'Ariel'. Is there anyone knowledgeable about this sort of thing who can explain why it's so prevalent?
- kh1411 14y agoPrevalent pop icon: Disney's "The Little Mermaid" was Ariel.
- VLM 14y agoIf you opened a clothing altering retail shop called "Taylor Shop" WRT your HN name, you'd have to expect a large fraction of the population to write your establishments name as "Tailor Shop" Likewise there's only one Arial font but tens of thousands of girls named Ariel, so odds are your font is going to get spelled Ariel an awful lot by people who think Ariel first as either a human girl or a movie character.
- jsilence 14y agoThank you, now you have ruined Arial for me. Before this test I considered the differences negligible, without really knowing what the differences are. Now I consider Helvetica much more elegant and incisive.
- aidos 14y agoMaybe it is more elegant, but if you don't want cross browser, cross platform rendering issues you'll stick with Arial.
- Trezoid 14y agoNo, you should stick with verdana. It's fully cross-platform, designed from the start to be a screen font, and generally looks better. Alternatively, @font-face is supported by just about everything at this point, opening up the opportunity to use much better fonts, like open sans (also, helvetica is a print font. It doesn't work for body copy at the sizes commonly used for screen text.)
- navs 14y agoLearn something new every day. I've always used Helvetica on all my web pages at the behest of my design co-worker. He's a print designer so it makes sense now.
- mortenjorck 14y agoWell, it really depends on how the digitization of Helvetica that any particular user has installed is hinted. The Helvetica that comes with MacOS is quite nicely hinted, and will make for a pleasant read at most sizes. On Windows, however, Helvetica isn't (at least from my experience) as nicely hinted, or at least doesn't play quite as well with Microsoft ClearType. And that's if it's installed, which is less likely on Windows. In that case, if your font stack specifies a fallback to Arial, which is ClearType's best friend, you'll probably be fine.
- Trezoid 14y ago
- fotoblur 14y agoGot 19 out of 20. I missed the Panasonic one. What I like most about Helvetica is the top of the t is flat rather than sharp and there is less stylizing overall. Arial, for me, breaks the philosophy of stylizing for stylizing sake. Helvetica, IMHO, was already perfect. This makes me remember the Essay by Adolf Loos' Ornament and Crime (1929) (http://technical-english.wikidot.com/text-1-2 http://technical-english.wikidot.com/text-1-2). Albeit bordering on racist propaganda contains very valid points on ornamentation being wasteful which I believe was a hallmark of Dieter Rams philosophy, "Good design is as little design as possible" which highly influences Apple's industrial designer Jonathan Ive.
- jonathanjaeger 14y agoHere's something interesting to do with the same test. Instead of guessing which one you think is Helvetica, choose the one you like better. Then see if Helvetica shows up more times than Arial (or vice versa).
- snu 14y agoGreat idea! Personally I had no bias towards either font, but now discovered that I do in fact like Helvetica a bit more (12 out of 20 times). Would be interesting to be able to see a test like that with statistics on how many chose each font for each logo.
- jonathanjaeger 14y agoYeah, going into it I didn't know much about the differences between the fonts but was curious anyway. After getting a few wrong I switched to choosing which ones I thought looked nicer and started getting Helvetica more times. That reminds me I need to finish watching the Helvetica documentary.
- neolefty 14y agoDangit, I did that and discovered that I prefer Arial! I think it is (slightly) easier to read; it also seems more relaxed and fluid, less unnecessarily squared-up.
- GIFtheory 14y agoI guessed that, given that Arial was probably a Helvetica clone, its designers probably added superfluous flourishes to differentiate it. That led me to notice the weirdly angled edges in Arial, which gave away most of them. So, yeah, proof of why Arial is dumb.
- el_cuadrado 14y ago20/20, although MATTEL was tricky. That pesky capital 'A'.
- loup-vaillant 14y agoI got 3 out of twenty, 2 of which I was lucky to see the capital R. I guess I can tell the difference, though I'd be careful to reverse all my answers in the future.
- pbhjpbhj 14y agoI like it. I couldn't tell at the start and so I guessed based on which logos looked best composed, then I noticed the uniqueness particularly in r and t letter forms. This actually gave me a new respect Helvetica.
- crntaylor 14y agoThis is silly. I know nothing about the difference between Arial and Helvetica. If anything thought that Helvetica was slightly lighter, so in the first question I guessed at the lighter of the two fonts, which it turns out was Arial. Every question after that I guessed the heavier of the two fonts, and I got a 19/20 score.
- aleprok 14y agoI'm not really good with the fonts and their differences, but after the first one which I failed I got 18/20 and the other I failed which was TOYOTA.
- aneth4 14y agoI got one wrong. I attribute that not to my genius but to having seen the excellent documentary "Helvetica". Turns out that's an excellent home date movie.
- sejje 14y agoI'm a lowly developer and have never even heard the debate about Helvetica. I couldn't have told you the first thing about it. It took me two slides to figure out that "the one I like" is Arial, and pick the opposite. I missed three more, but they were incredibly similar (TOYOTA, MATTEL). Anyway, this difference is quite obvious in general, I'm not sure what the author is on about.
- joejohnson 14y agoHere's a handy reference that shows the distinguishing differences between the two typefaces: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Similar_typefaces http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Similar_typefaces
- Gravityloss 14y agoDidn't anyone judge them by how good they looked ? Not "pixel peeping" but the general outlook. Arial looks vertically uneven somehow - the tops of the letters of a word seem to form a more solid straight line with Helvetica.
- rtkwe 14y agoI'd never bothered comparing them before, never used Helvetica that I can remember, and I got 17/20. 2 at the start till I noticed the obvious lower case differences. The only other one was MATELL which difficult, didn't notice the difference in the As.
- Kluny 14y agoIt's very easy - all I did was think "Which one looks better?" and I got it right every time.
- JimmaDaRustla 14y agoI got 90%...what is the point of this?
- curiousdannii 14y agoVery easy for all but MATTEL. For MATTEL I went with the one which was kerned better, and no surprise, it was Helvetica!
- nnq 14y ago...wow, this turn my mind into believing Arial looks better than Helvetica most of the time! Blasphemy!!!
- Semiapies 14y agoApparently, the answer is "Easily, unless it's all caps."
- nej 14y agoGot a 18 out of 20. To me Arial looks a bit informal when compared to Helvetica. While Helvetica has level edges, Arial feels more loose and forgiving. I use both fonts in Applications but never really looked at them up close until now. Thank your or this test.
- dutchbrit 14y agoShame that Arial doesn't come in light & medium weight (as windows alternative to Mac)
- PeterisP 14y agoI used to think that this doesn't matter, as both fonts in text seemed good to me - but now in these logos, all cases where I was able to distinguish them, the Arial version was butt ugly and the original far better looking even to my non-designer eye.
- brainless 14y agoFun spoiler: do NOT look at the image SRC. I liked the game, but I did what any idiot would when they see such pages - Inspect Element. Damn!
- jbrooksuk 14y ago20/20 BUT it was almost 19 because of Mattel.
- theanalyst 14y agoFun game, loved it, though G, lowercase edges can solve most cases. It comes down to kerning in the more difficult ones, Helvetica is a perfect Geometric Sans, and that should help in most cases
- yardie 14y agoI flew right through them. The MATTEL logo gave me a slight pause, picking the prettier, more symmetrical choice made it easier to identify the remainder.
- viggity 14y agoThere are (at least) three "bugs" in this quiz (i.e. artifacts from the alteration). The person who made them must have a crappy monitor if the differences weren't noticeable. That, or they were just sloppy. Still, fun quiz though. Here are the bugs: http://imgur.com/a/S2aDO http://imgur.com/a/S2aDO
- tbirdz 14y agoApparently, judging from my perfect score, I can easily tell them apart.