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I really should get that T-shirt I have been thinking about, with "Helvetica!" written on it in Comic Sans.
by fhars 13y ago
I really should get that T-shirt I have been thinking about, with "Helvetica!" written on it in Comic Sans.
- hengheng 13y agoThere is some potential to create the weirdest partner look.
- ajanuary 13y agoI made one with Helvetica written in arial. I always find it interesting to see who picks up on it, but I haven't quite worked out if that makes me like them more or less.
- mansr 13y agoI have one of those too. It's quite rare that anyone comments on it.
- StavrosK 13y agoCan someone tell me why people scoff at the use of Arial or Verdana or whatever? Helvetica and Arial look extremely similar, what's the problem?
- mansr 13y agoArial is a sloppy-looking knockoff of Helvetica. It's the typographical equivalent of fake designer clothes. There's nothing inherently wrong with using Verdana as a screen font.
- zokier 13y agoPreferring Helvetica over Arial is commonly just pure snobbery. There are couple of reasons behind that: Helvetica is associated with Macs while Arial is associated with Microsoft. Helvetica can be argued to be "more original" than Arial. The Arial we usually see (Microsofts version) is heavily optimized for low-res screen display at body text sizes, which some might say compromise it for high-res/print use. Helvetica is also available in significantly more variants than the Bold/Italic MS Arial.
- vinceguidry 13y agoWhen I was a kid writing essays in school on Microsoft Word, I used Arial for awhile, but I started to hate it, even though I didn't know squat about typography. It was just ugly. Ugly on the screen, ugly on paper. So I switched largely to Verdana, though I did go through a Trebuchet phase. To this day, I loathe the look of Arial. When I was first introduced to Helvetica, still knowing nothing about type, I thought it was really pretty. There's more to it than snobbery.
- StavrosK 13y agoOkay, how? They're pretty much exactly the same typeface, except for some minor angles in some letters.
- vinceguidry 13y agoWell, to be fair, I didn't have Helvetica available at the time I developed my hatred of Arial to compare. And when I look at blown-up / high res versions of Arial text now on my spiffy MacBook screen, they don't look so bad. But looking at old screenshots of Win3.1 still draws my ire. Verdana would have made Windows look so much better had they made that the main OS sans-serif. Arial's just so... pedestrian. It may have had much more to do with the fact that Win 3.11 had shitty text display than with any real problem with Arial. But Arial really did look horrendous to my eyes compared to Verdana, on the same machine. I do think that had I had access to Helvetica back then I would have liked it more. But without a time machine it's impossible to tell. I also grew up with computers and started looking at text on screens from the fourth grade. I'd had a long time to develop my eye for type by the time I was writing papers in high school. I could look at a page of printed text and tell which (Microsoft) font it was using, I doubt many kids back then could. I do think I'd have been able to tell Arial from Helvetica. There are quite a few differences between the two. Enough that my practiced eye would be able to tell the difference. Not that my programming day job affords me much practice in that regard.
- wubbfindel 13y agoDone already? http://www.cafepress.co.uk/mf/29706513/helvetica_tshirt?utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=t-shirts&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=cpc-product-ads-uk&utm_content=296357381&productId=296357381 http://www.cafepress.co.uk/mf/29706513/helvetica_tshirt?utm_...