Simon Willison’s Weblog

Arial and Helvetica

1st July 2002

The Scourge of Arial (via Zeldman). An interesting short history of modern typefaces and how Arial become widespread despite being merely a poor imitation of Helvetica.

Posted 1st July 2002 at 11:56 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

V&A East Storehouse and Operation Mincemeat in London - 27th August 2025
The Summer of Johann: prompt injections as far as the eye can see - 15th August 2025
Open weight LLMs exhibit inconsistent performance across providers - 15th August 2025

This is Arial and Helvetica by Simon Willison, posted on 1st July 2002.

Next: PHP form problem

Previous: TrackBack

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe

Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2002/07/01/arialAndHelvetica