The good, the bad and the ugly

Reflections on professional ethics through the prism of type design. 

When I think about ethics in my profession, there’s one particular story that comes to mind. It is a story about typefaces surrounding us, a story about Helvetica, Arial and about how things went terribly wrong.

As an inhabitant of the modern world, these are the two typefaces that you have encountered a lot, maybe even without realizing it — Helvetica and Arial. These are also two representatives of the same type group; one that managed to become the world’s most loved and hated typeface at the same time; and one, that everybody heard about but nobody can point at.

Helvetica

Designed in 1957 and intended to be sold in the West, Helvetica was a huge success, it took the graphic world of corporate America of the 60's by storm. It was the solution for everything. Nothing felt more refreshing in a post-war world than replacing an old ugly script with Helvetica Bold. It was used by big brands, by small shops, on television and in print, it was everywhere, and it still is. Helvetica possesses some kind of visual rightness, the curves express perfection and create beautiful shapes between letters. Helvetica feels solid while leaving room for self-expression, you can set type in Helvetica Ultralight and be delicate or you can set it in Bold and make a statement. The whole structure of the typeface is based on geometrical rules, from horizontally sliced terminals to the interrelation of the negative shapes. For what it is, it’s brilliant, a nearly perfect typeface.

This is the kind of story that type designers want for their creations, they want them to be used, loved and hated and talked about, they want to produce something that has vitality.

Everything that had to be said about Helvetica, has been already said. Phew.

Arial

Arial, on the other hand, has a wicked past. It’s a common misconception that Arial was made for Microsoft. The story says that it was made on their insidious request, that they wanted without paying royalties — or credit — to Helvetica, preserve most of Helvetica’s features and still get a different font. Arial is indeed, nothing but a clone of Helvetica made by Monotype. But the story of how it came around is complicated and dusty. It was the time of type-formats war, between Adobe, Apple and Microsoft. Arial was one the clones of so popular at that time Helvetica, developed to compete with Adobe.

There were many attempts to improve/modify Helvetica, and none were successful. Certain things are just not to be messed with.

“If you have a perfect typeface and you change it, you can’t go better, … you can only go worse” — Erik Spiekermann.

And Arial did turn out worse, they took the exact spacing of the characters, their proportions and weight so all Helvetica text can be easily replaced with Arial and then slightly modified the glyphs. You overlap two upper-case ‘R’s and quickly discover this by yourself — Arial’s shapes are nearly identical to those of Helvetica.

So how did it get so popular?

The ones to blame are Microsoft — a company with no taste but virtually unlimited funds. While Apple licensed Helvetica from Linotype and payed the fee, Microsoft decided to bundle Monotype’s Arial with their Windows 3.1 and avoid the licensing fees, thinking that most people won’t be able to tell the difference or even care. Due to heavy bundling, Arial displaced Helvetica in all nonprofessional materials. In today’s world, if you ever had to deal with Microsoft products, on a PC or Mac, you’ve already used Arial.

I can’t accuse Microsoft or Monotype of stealing, but I do think they committed a shameless typographic crime, and it was unethical. In the typographic world, history matters, it’s about the respect that you pay to a foundry or a designer. Every good typeface was born from a specific need and it represents the solution of a certain problem of the past. And it is the constraints dictated by that problem that shaped it. Helvetica emerged from the need for rational, geometric typefaces, able to express idealism and Swiss order. Arial didn’t, and this is why it’s bad.

Getting all finicky

Designers fight the visual noise and create order, they cure the disorder with design. Even though their work is underpinned by a business motive, details and philosophy matter to them.

When it comes to designing typefaces, 95% of your work is already done, the shapes of letters are already well defined and printed in our consciousness. They come from our handwriting. That’s why you can read other people’s handwriting and they can read yours, even though they are both far from being anything we would call legible; that is to say, how far they are from a real typeface. It’s the other 5% that add character to a typeface, that spark, that ‘magic’ — as cliché as it sounds. You can’t innovate on the shape of the ‘a’. This is why type-designers are so pedantic, since there is so little to discuss, it is all about being pedantic.

I can talk a lot about how Arial came around and how inferior it is to Helvetica, but what really matters is the choice that you’ll have to make as a professional, because one typeface got popular by being forced on you and the other for its own merits.