Hey, how do you pronounce Helvetica, anyway?
Like it’s spelled. Hel-vet-i-ca.
Font snobs. Seriously, it’s microsoft so it has to be terrible, right? Certainly they got rich by screwing you, right?? The facts are that if you read the article that this blog links to (http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html) , the uber-font freak says :
“This is not such a big deal since at the low resolution
of a computer screen, it might as well be Helvetica”
That’s not me writing that, it’s the same freak that has his movie experience ruined because of a serif on the ‘i’ of a sign in the back of a street scene that gives away it’s a font from 1978 instead of a nearly identical one from 1957. (http://www.ms-studio.com/typecasting.html)
Nice read indeed. I’m glad I haven’t seen comic sans pop up anywhere in the comments! hah, Helvetica is a very solid font, I gained alot of respect for it over the past few monthes. When I first started design for the web, I thought Verdana was a pretty solid font. However on print, it is poor on the eyes. It also doesn’t seem to break right for me.
My recent font of love, is Courier New. It makes me feel like an elite coder when I read it. haha
Maybe they did “cheap out” when they picked Arial as the default sans serif font for Windows. Boo hoo. Until someone invents a time machine there isn’t anything anyone can do about that. But they’ve been making attempts to correct that mistake for some time:
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=54974
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=146749
You may not like the new fonts, but Microsoft appears to be spending a pile of money designing new ones. And others seem to agree that the new fonts are pretty good:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/links/news.aspx?NID=5816
Outside of those links, Bill Hill has some very interesting things to say on other subjects as well:
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=112
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=114
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=4295
Now all the Microsoft haters who were arguing “Microsoft doesn’t care about good typography!” can switch to arguing “They’re just trying to drive all the other font vendors out of business with their own fonts! They’re evvvvvvvvil!”
What’s so funny about these hate-filled opinions is that Bill Hill doesn’t strike me as “evil” in any way, shape or form. He seems to be genuinely interested in producing the best quality product for Microsoft’s customers. But that can’t be, he works for Microsoft, so it must all be an act…
The default is fine.
Courier? Fine.
Times New Roman? Fine.
Seriously.
Typefaces are the gateway drug of typography. It starts with fonts, then you’ll be hand kerning and eventually you’ll be up all night with grids and vertical rhythm and column width. Be careful, kids.
You can’t copyright the look of a font. However, you can copyright the code that does the hinting of a font (which is indeed a small computer program), and you can copyright the spline points for the vector that defines the glyph.
If you redraw the glyphs from scratch, it is perfectly legal.
The ice cream man in my neighborhood has his company name and info hand-painted on his truck, and he uses at least 5 fonts.
I haven’t seen mentioned here yet is Robin Williams’ (NOT THE Robin Williams, but a female design expert) The Non-Designer’s Design and Type Books
Great books. Indeed I have mentioned them before, thank you for reminding me.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000853.html
We already have millions of pixels!
I was thinking of per-sentence and per-word, more than absolute screen size-- the ratio of pixels to the letters on the screen.
Another book worthy of your attention is “TEX and METAFONT: New directions in typesetting” by Donald Knuth himself. It was published in 1979 and has been out of print for years, so may not be the easiest book to get your hands on these days.
Wow. Seventy-seven comments in two days; fonts are like colors – everyone knows what they like but not everyone can incorporate them well in design. I enjoyed the Bringhurst book, but at times I found myself amazed at the passion exhibited towards type. That stated, I personally have a physical negative reaction when viewing Comic Sans, and I remove it from any computer system I use regularly.
One aside that I found amusing is that the MoMA website prefers Arial over Helvetica in its stylesheet.
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=4506
Is quite consistent in declaring font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; in its CSS stylesheet. Perhaps they don’t expect Windows users to even have Helvetica installed.
We already have millions of pixels! (1280x1024 10^6)
I get the point though… just being pedantic.
I’m in the middle of reading “The Hacker Crackdown” (http://www.mit.edu:8001/hacker/hacker.html - if you google there’s a good audio book of it too both legally for free) and after going though the rise of ATT and telephone networks the book is now talking about BBS’s and how they started “cyberspace” communities, this whole website with our comments and these articles and stories, it’s a nice evolution from a small BBS. I called the three numbers in the image and all of them are disconnected. I’m not surprised there is no computer listening at the end of them but I find it funny they’ve been taken (I’m guessing) permanently out of service.
some people apparently write code using Comic Sans as their code font
If you use Notepad++, the default font used for comments (in code) IS Comic Sans.
I’ll have to give Microsoft credit starting with the web fonts for actually providing reasonable alternatives to Arial that can actually be used for body text. I remember that most of the fonts that shipped with Microsoft Office were display fonts.
Microsoft also used to claim that their TrueType fonts looked better on screen than Adobe Type 1 fonts. Although the extensive hinting made the fonts looked different at screen size and when anti-aliasing was not used. Arial even looked decent at 10 and 12 points.
@Shawn: I would also add Ms. Williams’ “The Mac Is Not A Typewriter”. It has a bunch of nice, juicy tidbits for using type on a Mac, but I believe it’s equally applicable to Windows, Linux and others. She also coauthored “The PC Is Not A Typewriter”, but it’s been long out-of-print.
Hi Jeff,
A very good post and I loved it… coz to some extent I, myself am a fusion of logic and art.
At an early age, I learnt coreldraw which gives you the freedom of creating your own font. I created one long back but it was crude.
Hope to do some in future.
Thanks for the great post. This one struck a chord in me. I too started out in the Apple ][ days and remember good old 300 baud. Even after leaving behind software development (mostly) a couple of career changes ago, my love for type has been sustained. After graduating from law school in 1997, I helped found a new law journal. One of my principal missions was to make it readable, unlike most of the other stuff available in that space. I think we probably spent more on fonts than any other law journal in history (Adobe Jenson was my favorite).
Unfortunately, the corporate “standards” - both at my former law firm and my new management consulting home - require use of Arial and Times New Roman. Yuck.
I trust that Times and Arial will be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Helvetica is better than Arial but let’s face it, both are pretty damn ugly. So are Times and
Courier. … If you cherish your readers, please don’t ever use Arial, Helvetica or Times – use
proper typefaces like Garamond, Minion, Myriad, Optima instead! Or even Microsoft’s newer
web fonts like Lucida and Georgia. Times is for cheap newspapers, and Helvetica/Arial is for
station signs.
Can’t agree with you there. Times doesn’t look that good on a screen, true, but it was never designed to – as a newspaper body font, it is well-designed, and most certainly a “proper typeface” (and possibly The Times, founded 1785 as the UK’s newspaper of record and which commissioned Times Roman in 1931, would take umbrage at being referred to as a “cheap newspaper”…).
The typeface which you suggest to use instead, Georgia, is actually a very similar font indeed to Times in terms of letterforms, except that its serifs were designed as to fit the pixel grid and it’s much more extensively hinted for low font sizes; which is why it looks much better on-screen. (It works the other way as well – fonts which were designed purely to look good on the screen, e.g. Verdana, often look like crap on paper).
Verdana is a best choice for the default font for Word 2007 and Vista.
No, Verdana is a terrible choice of default font for Word 2007, because although it’s very readable on screen, it look rubbish on paper (as I and Dan have said in previous comments).
Luckily, it isn’t the default for either Word 2007 or Vista. Nor is, as Josh Hurley claims, Cambria (for either). The actual default font in Word 2007 is Calibri, which is a rounded, sans-serif typeface designed to look nice both on page and in print (Cambria is indeed the default font for headings).
The interface font Vista uses is different from all of these, and is called Segoe UI; it is a humanist font reminiscent of Frutiger.