‘The Scourge of Arial’

Typographer Mark Simonson, all the way back in 2001:

Arial is everywhere. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft’s influence in the world.

Arial’s ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It’s actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor.

This is the exegesis on Arial. There’s also an exemplary illustrated sidebar, “How to Spot Arial”, which shows in detail how to tell the fucking bastard from Helvetica. If you want to be like me, cursed to notice Arial each time it appears in life, study that, and take note how every single way that it’s different from Helvetica is in the direction of making it uglier.

I’ve referenced “The Scourge of Arial” a few times over the years here at DF, but the recent contretemps over Times New Roman’s return at the US State Department has the general topic of “default fonts” at top of mind. For me, at least.

One of the old posts in which I linked to “The Scourge of Arial” was this gem from September 2007: “Hacking the iPhone Notes App for the Admittedly Nit-Picky Purpose of Changing the Text Font to Helvetica”. This was so early in the iPhone era — just three months after the original iPhone shipped — that we were calling its operating system “mobile OS X”, and none of it was protected in any way, so you could do what I did and delete the Marker Felt font (Merlin Mann: “Comic Sans with a shave and a breath mint”) and then use a hex editor to modify the Mobile Notes app so it would fall back to Helvetica instead of cursed Arial after Marker Felt was deleted. Good times.

★ Monday, 15 December 2025