Why I hate Arial
Many students ask me why I dislike Arial so much. I decided to write down my reasons. Here they are: First, I find Arial to be an unattractive font. To me, both Arial and Comic Sans rank among the worst fonts in history. Second, most people stick with Arial because many software programs set it as the default and list it early in the font menu, thanks to its alphabetical order. Third, no skilled designer has ever chosen Arial for a professional project, not in the history of graphic design. Fourth, if given a choice, almost no one would pick Arial for its looks. I ran some tests where people chose between four sans serif fonts, and almost everyone rejected Arial. This makes me think that calling Arial “ugly” isn’t just my opinion—others agree. These people weren’t designers, either. Arial has been around since 1982, created by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders at Monotype. It was originally made for IBM’s bitmap font library. Later, Microsoft adopted it in the early...