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For a kick: http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/ http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/

by theswan 13y ago

riffraff 13y ago
I thought I couldn't tell the difference but got 18/20. I know nothing about typography, but after getting the first wrong it's surprisingly easy: just look at c,s,o,R,G.
- andyhmltn 13y ago
  And the t's. Helvetica doesn't have weird slants on the top :)
girvo 13y ago
I'm no designer, but I got 14/20. I guess my years of using Macs rubbed off on my subconscious.
rprospero 13y ago
As I've said elsewhere in this thread, I simply don't understand typography. I took the quiz and got 10/20, which I could have gotten from just guessing randomly. Was the Helvetica supposed to be more readable than the Arial? Or is Arial supposed to be a substitute for Helvetica?
- Spittie 13y ago
  Many "font experts" consider Helvetica one of the best font ever created, and at the same time call Arial a "bad one". That side is supposed to show that in reality Arial is very close to Helvetica, and not everyone is capable of distinguish them.
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  Interesting quiz. I found the differences in ends of the C's, and the s's, and a's, and the tops of the t's, and the like. In the Helvetica ones they're completely level; in the Arial they've got a little bit of a tilt to them. NFC how the uppercase editions differ, though. :b
- at-fates-hands 13y ago
  Arial wasn't around until 1982. I think it happened more or less by mistake. The intent wasn't to make it be a substitute for Helvetica: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial The letter shapes of Arial are based on Monotype Grotesque.[5][6] Subtle changes and variations were made to both the letterforms and the spacing between characters in order to make it more readable at various resolutions. The changes cause the typeface to nearly match Linotype Helvetica in both proportion and weight[7] (see figure), and perfectly match in width. Nevertheless, there are differences. One columnist observed "Arial was drawn more rounded than [Helvetica], the curves softer and fuller and the counters more open. The ends of the strokes on letters such as c, e, g and s, rather than being cut off on the horizontal, are terminated at the more natural angle in relation to the stroke direction."
- AlphaGeekZulu 13y ago
  I had 19 of 20 (the Toyota-capitals are too hard to distinguish). The story is this: all the big typesetting companies, like Berthold, Linotype, Monotype and so on, have been type foundries originally. They created printing characters of lead. Later they started to develop mechanical machinery for typesetting (especially Linotype) and soon after they started to develop machinery for fototypesetting (making way for the wide spread use of offset-printing, replacing letterpress printing). All the time, they also provided the fonts for their machinery and this fonts were very expensive. A single typeface (like Helvetica 55) would cost around 800 German Marks (roughly 550 US$ today) as a mercury-metallized glas plate from Berthold, containing the full character set. A type shop would often spend more money for the fonts than for the machinery (and the typeshop I was working for even had a dedicated insurance for the glas plates). All the modern copyright laws existed already at this time and the big problem was, that a certain fontstyle would become fashionable (like Helvetica!) in the designers world, but only one type foundry owned the font. Fonts were not interchangeable between vendors and owning a good font collection with a lot of fashionable fonts could influence the system decision for the typesetting machinery. So all big manufacturers spent a lot of money for their own type labs AND for lawyers! I grew up in the font atelier of the H.Berthold AG in Taufkirchen, near Munich, where my father was working and I witnessed as a teenager, how they digitized the lead fonts into fototype fonts - an incredible laborous and artistic job. Often, there was a big pressure to provide a certain font style within the vendors system environment, and so it was common to clone the popular fonts if they were owned by someone else. There have been lots of lawsuits, where judges had to decide whether two fonts are distinguishable enough, or have to be considered illegal copies. All the many variants we have of the Helvetica, like the Akzidenz Grotesk, the Normal Grotesk, the Neue Haas Grotesk, the Arial etc, have their motives not so much in readability or artistic reasons, but rather in license conflicts of different type foundries. Sometimes the cloning font lab was better than the original and the clone came out better than the original. VERY MANY fonts of the professional typesetting world were cloned again when Desktop Publishing emerged, to avoid license fees in the PostScript world. These copies can be recognized by their silly names. This development, in general, worsened the font quality. Not so much for the look-a-like of the single character, but for the metadata like "aesthetics letter widths". So, just look into the owners of the fonts that seem undistinguishable for you, and the whole thing starts making sense: Akzidenz Grotesk = H. Berthold AG; Helvetica = Linotype; Arial = Monotype; Maxima = Helvetica of the former East German Republic (they did not want to use the font of the enemy). Nevertheless, Helvetica is the best ;-) (And just to make this clear: Univers, Futura and Frutiger do not have the slightest similarity with Helvetica)

For a kick: http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/ http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/

by theswan 13y ago

For a kick: http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/ http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/

I thought I couldn't tell the difference but got 18/20. I know nothing about typography, but after getting the first wrong it's surprisingly easy: just look at c,s,o,R,G.

andyhmltn 13y ago
And the t's. Helvetica doesn't have weird slants on the top :)

girvo 13y ago

I'm no designer, but I got 14/20. I guess my years of using Macs rubbed off on my subconscious.

rprospero 13y ago

As I've said elsewhere in this thread, I simply don't understand typography. I took the quiz and got 10/20, which I could have gotten from just guessing randomly. Was the Helvetica supposed to be more readable than the Arial? Or is Arial supposed to be a substitute for Helvetica?

Spittie 13y ago
Many "font experts" consider Helvetica one of the best font ever created, and at the same time call Arial a "bad one". That side is supposed to show that in reality Arial is very close to Helvetica, and not everyone is capable of distinguish them.
fennecfoxen 13y ago
Interesting quiz. I found the differences in ends of the C's, and the s's, and a's, and the tops of the t's, and the like. In the Helvetica ones they're completely level; in the Arial they've got a little bit of a tilt to them. NFC how the uppercase editions differ, though. :b
at-fates-hands 13y ago
Arial wasn't around until 1982. I think it happened more or less by mistake. The intent wasn't to make it be a substitute for Helvetica: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial The letter shapes of Arial are based on Monotype Grotesque.[5][6] Subtle changes and variations were made to both the letterforms and the spacing between characters in order to make it more readable at various resolutions. The changes cause the typeface to nearly match Linotype Helvetica in both proportion and weight[7] (see figure), and perfectly match in width. Nevertheless, there are differences. One columnist observed "Arial was drawn more rounded than [Helvetica], the curves softer and fuller and the counters more open. The ends of the strokes on letters such as c, e, g and s, rather than being cut off on the horizontal, are terminated at the more natural angle in relation to the stroke direction."
AlphaGeekZulu 13y ago
I had 19 of 20 (the Toyota-capitals are too hard to distinguish). The story is this: all the big typesetting companies, like Berthold, Linotype, Monotype and so on, have been type foundries originally. They created printing characters of lead. Later they started to develop mechanical machinery for typesetting (especially Linotype) and soon after they started to develop machinery for fototypesetting (making way for the wide spread use of offset-printing, replacing letterpress printing). All the time, they also provided the fonts for their machinery and this fonts were very expensive. A single typeface (like Helvetica 55) would cost around 800 German Marks (roughly 550 US$ today) as a mercury-metallized glas plate from Berthold, containing the full character set. A type shop would often spend more money for the fonts than for the machinery (and the typeshop I was working for even had a dedicated insurance for the glas plates). All the modern copyright laws existed already at this time and the big problem was, that a certain fontstyle would become fashionable (like Helvetica!) in the designers world, but only one type foundry owned the font. Fonts were not interchangeable between vendors and owning a good font collection with a lot of fashionable fonts could influence the system decision for the typesetting machinery. So all big manufacturers spent a lot of money for their own type labs AND for lawyers! I grew up in the font atelier of the H.Berthold AG in Taufkirchen, near Munich, where my father was working and I witnessed as a teenager, how they digitized the lead fonts into fototype fonts - an incredible laborous and artistic job. Often, there was a big pressure to provide a certain font style within the vendors system environment, and so it was common to clone the popular fonts if they were owned by someone else. There have been lots of lawsuits, where judges had to decide whether two fonts are distinguishable enough, or have to be considered illegal copies. All the many variants we have of the Helvetica, like the Akzidenz Grotesk, the Normal Grotesk, the Neue Haas Grotesk, the Arial etc, have their motives not so much in readability or artistic reasons, but rather in license conflicts of different type foundries. Sometimes the cloning font lab was better than the original and the clone came out better than the original. VERY MANY fonts of the professional typesetting world were cloned again when Desktop Publishing emerged, to avoid license fees in the PostScript world. These copies can be recognized by their silly names. This development, in general, worsened the font quality. Not so much for the look-a-like of the single character, but for the metadata like "aesthetics letter widths". So, just look into the owners of the fonts that seem undistinguishable for you, and the whole thing starts making sense: Akzidenz Grotesk = H. Berthold AG; Helvetica = Linotype; Arial = Monotype; Maxima = Helvetica of the former East German Republic (they did not want to use the font of the enemy). Nevertheless, Helvetica is the best ;-) (And just to make this clear: Univers, Futura and Frutiger do not have the slightest similarity with Helvetica)