> When Microsoft made TrueType the standard font format for Windows 3.1, they opted to go with Arial rather than Helvetica, probably because it was cheaper
That's a myth. Microsoft paid a lot of money to MonoType, as I believe they needed to task several full-time employees with the manual hinting of those fonts. The deal probably saved the foundry from bankruptcy.
"As to the widespread notion that Microsoft did not want to pay licensing fees, Allan Haley has publicly stated, more than once, that the amount of money Microsoft paid over the years for the development of Arial could finance a small country."
Would have been interesting to also see a note about Verdana, and know if Microsoft shifting away from Arial as the default sans serif has changed its popularity as much as one might think.
For another reason for this, look up the Linotype trademark case where Microsoft was sued for the pixel font names "Tms Rmn", and "Helv" --- it was to say the least, unpalatable for MS to do business with a company which had trounced them in court.
As an old school font snob, I'm a huge fan of Zapf Dingbats, especially those elegant pointing hands. None of the modern brutalist hand emojis can hold a candle to them.
Zapf Dingbats’ little pointing hands are less mere bullets than distilled manicules: their sleek, tapering wrists and attenuated index fingers fuse medieval marginalia’s flourishes with mid-century modernism’s rigor, transforming a humble signpost into a compact, almost fetishized arrow of attention.
They're sleek and minimal enough to function as crisply hard modern bullets, yet they retain a soft, calligraphic, Victorian flourish (the very essence of the medieval manicule, digitized by Hermann Zapf in 1978), making them perfectly at home in a vintage Beagle Bros Apple ][ Software Catalog.
I don't understand the Verdana hate. It's a decent screen font, especially at low resolutions. It may not be ideal for print, but that isn't what it was designed for.
Verdana isn’t terrible, it’s just that it’s so much worse than fonts like Frutiger and Gill Sans that inspired it (similarly to Arial/Helvetica). It’s screams ”free font that kinda rips off really good ones”, and for a giant company like IKEA, you’d expect them to do better. Especially since their previous typeface was Futura, an all-timer.
First off all, these fonts are not "free" as in "free software", they are owned by Microsoft and to use them you have to agree to a Microsoft EULA (technically, though this isn't enforced). They're "free as in beer", not "free as in freedom" (this is my understanding at least, welcome to be corrected on this point).
Second: the objection isn't necessarily just that Verdana is free, it's that it's not a very good-looking font. Certainly in most people's opinion, it's nothing like as cool as Futura. IKEA, a massive multi-national company and an iconic brand, can and should do better. They say they did this to "align print and web", presumably meaning they wanted to use a font that was guaranteed to work in all browsers, but that's such a shame for print, really sacrificing great typography on the altar of browser support.
Third: font design is an art and a craft just like graphic design, photography, furniture design, script-writing, music production, whatever. There are certainly people who think literally everything should be free (as in "every Hollywood release should be Creative Commons"), but that's a rather extreme position. If you think it's a good thing that IKEA pays graphic designers to design their catalog, and furniture designers to design their furniture, you should think it's a good thing that IKEA pays typographers for their typeface design.
There are certainly issues with licensing in the world of typeface design (the emerging Monotype monopoly is really disturbing, for instance), but expecting giant companies to pay for good typography instead of using bad free typography is not some "anti-free software" stance.
You can pay a font designer a fixed fee to create a font, just like you pay a programmer a fixed fee to work on Linux. Could be even $1 mil / font.
But perpetual licensing for a font, why?
Verdana/Futura, what about familiarity? Verdana is certainly more familiar to more people than Futura, and we know from psychology that familiarity has an impact in everything we do.
What if IKEA switched to Verdana because studies show that it's "better" for sales? Surely paying for Futura is a rounding error in their balance sheet.
Sometimes, something that seems like an "obviously terrible decision" to subject matter experts turns out to be inconsequential, or perhaps even good. Ask a corporate identity expert in 1998 if you should name your big important company "Google" and they'd vomit in your face. Of course it looks very different in hindsight.
In much the same way, I'd argue that the Verdana typeface was a bolder and significantly more distinctive choice compared to something safe and well-trodden like Futura. Despite Verdana's widespread use on the web, approximately nobody had ever dared to use it in the way IKEA did, making it utterly distinctive.
Personally I think IKEA's shift to Noto was disappointing. At their scale they could have easily paid a type designer to make an IKEA Sans, inspired by Verdana, perhaps taking some cues from the likes of Raleway or Suisse Screen.
With the pixel density of typical displays these days being as high as they are (phones are often 300-400+ PPI), I think this distinction isn't what it used to be.
Wasn't this exactly what people were hating it for? IKEA used it for print and lots of large prints at that, not just pixel displays? I never said or wrote anything about it as far as I can remember, but I do think it looked worse than their previous typeface. Verdana is quite okay, if not good even, for body text.
But it looks like they have changed or customised their typeface recently, the digits and letters like "y" do not look like standard Verdana any more.
These days, Verdana is generally an indicator of either organisational decay or incompetence, especially when used in print, which it wasn’t designed for.
It hasn’t been a default in tools for decades, so it suggests either the organization hasn’t been able to afford to refresh the design for 25 years or the designer is incompetent.
Hate is a strong word, but Verdana is almost certainly the wrong font for your business branding in 2025.
Sometimes, something that seems like an "obviously terrible decision" to subject matter experts turns out to be inconsequential, or perhaps even good. Ask a corporate identity expert in 1998 if you should name your big important company "Google" and they'd vomit in your face. Of course it looks very different in hindsight.
Contrary to your claim, approximately nobody with a professionally designed corporate identity used Verdana in a printed context like IKEA did. It was a "wrong" choice like Google was the "wrong" name for a search engine. It's a perfectly serviceable font, like Times New Roman. And that font was good enough for The Times of London, for goodness sakes.
Helvetica is like vanilla. Often mischaracterised as plain and “default choice”, when done well it’s a distinct taste all of its own. In the hands of a master chef, it can be spectacular. But the majority of it is low effort and low quality.
That poor defenseless font Arial needs Mike Lacher to give it a voice, throw down the gauntlet, and go to the mat in defense of its honor, like he did with Comic Sans!
I'm not a web dev. Is what is displayed in the font tab (also Proxima Nova for me) what is actually used on screen? Or does the browser do its own substitutions?
If you look in Inspect it’ll show “as rendered” somewhere.
As a developer you can tell it what fonts to use, in a a particular order: “my font, closest default font, a windows font that’s ok, anything sans serif” is often what is used.
Browsers can download fonts from the web and use them to display text on web pages. You can Google "Web fonts" to get a lot of info, but basically you just put the font file on your server and the browser downloads it and uses it.
> When Microsoft made TrueType the standard font format for Windows 3.1, they opted to go with Arial rather than Helvetica, probably because it was cheaper
That's a myth. Microsoft paid a lot of money to MonoType, as I believe they needed to task several full-time employees with the manual hinting of those fonts. The deal probably saved the foundry from bankruptcy.
"As to the widespread notion that Microsoft did not want to pay licensing fees, Allan Haley has publicly stated, more than once, that the amount of money Microsoft paid over the years for the development of Arial could finance a small country."
https://www.paulshawletterdesign.com/2011/09/blue-pencil-no-...
So, they COULD have used Helvetica and spared us a lot of pain.
It doesn’t make me hate Arial any less.
Well-written. I learned a lot!
Would have been interesting to also see a note about Verdana, and know if Microsoft shifting away from Arial as the default sans serif has changed its popularity as much as one might think.
For another reason for this, look up the Linotype trademark case where Microsoft was sued for the pixel font names "Tms Rmn", and "Helv" --- it was to say the least, unpalatable for MS to do business with a company which had trounced them in court.
As an old school font snob, I'm a huge fan of Zapf Dingbats, especially those elegant pointing hands. None of the modern brutalist hand emojis can hold a candle to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapf_Dingbats
https://web.archive.org/web/20220705073411/https://www.inver...
Zapf Dingbats’ little pointing hands are less mere bullets than distilled manicules: their sleek, tapering wrists and attenuated index fingers fuse medieval marginalia’s flourishes with mid-century modernism’s rigor, transforming a humble signpost into a compact, almost fetishized arrow of attention.
They're sleek and minimal enough to function as crisply hard modern bullets, yet they retain a soft, calligraphic, Victorian flourish (the very essence of the medieval manicule, digitized by Hermann Zapf in 1978), making them perfectly at home in a vintage Beagle Bros Apple ][ Software Catalog.
http://asimov.applefritter.com/documentation/advertisements/...
https://beagle.applearchives.com/
How would you like to buy a new pair of hands?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQVgg_yUN20
For a while IKEA used Verdana as their corporate typeface, to the howls of despair from font aficionados everywhere.
Personally, I loved it. I think it really encapsulated the idea of it’s so bad that it’s good and really suited the “assembled at home“ vibe.
I don't understand the Verdana hate. It's a decent screen font, especially at low resolutions. It may not be ideal for print, but that isn't what it was designed for.
Verdana isn’t terrible, it’s just that it’s so much worse than fonts like Frutiger and Gill Sans that inspired it (similarly to Arial/Helvetica). It’s screams ”free font that kinda rips off really good ones”, and for a giant company like IKEA, you’d expect them to do better. Especially since their previous typeface was Futura, an all-timer.
I'm sorry, but since when do we hate on HN free alternatives to proprietary ones?
"free Linux which rips off really good UNIXes"
"free IDE which rips off really good IntelliJ"
"free music production app which rips off really good Logic Pro"
First off all, these fonts are not "free" as in "free software", they are owned by Microsoft and to use them you have to agree to a Microsoft EULA (technically, though this isn't enforced). They're "free as in beer", not "free as in freedom" (this is my understanding at least, welcome to be corrected on this point).
Second: the objection isn't necessarily just that Verdana is free, it's that it's not a very good-looking font. Certainly in most people's opinion, it's nothing like as cool as Futura. IKEA, a massive multi-national company and an iconic brand, can and should do better. They say they did this to "align print and web", presumably meaning they wanted to use a font that was guaranteed to work in all browsers, but that's such a shame for print, really sacrificing great typography on the altar of browser support.
Third: font design is an art and a craft just like graphic design, photography, furniture design, script-writing, music production, whatever. There are certainly people who think literally everything should be free (as in "every Hollywood release should be Creative Commons"), but that's a rather extreme position. If you think it's a good thing that IKEA pays graphic designers to design their catalog, and furniture designers to design their furniture, you should think it's a good thing that IKEA pays typographers for their typeface design.
There are certainly issues with licensing in the world of typeface design (the emerging Monotype monopoly is really disturbing, for instance), but expecting giant companies to pay for good typography instead of using bad free typography is not some "anti-free software" stance.
You can pay a font designer a fixed fee to create a font, just like you pay a programmer a fixed fee to work on Linux. Could be even $1 mil / font.
But perpetual licensing for a font, why?
Verdana/Futura, what about familiarity? Verdana is certainly more familiar to more people than Futura, and we know from psychology that familiarity has an impact in everything we do.
What if IKEA switched to Verdana because studies show that it's "better" for sales? Surely paying for Futura is a rounding error in their balance sheet.
Sometimes, something that seems like an "obviously terrible decision" to subject matter experts turns out to be inconsequential, or perhaps even good. Ask a corporate identity expert in 1998 if you should name your big important company "Google" and they'd vomit in your face. Of course it looks very different in hindsight.
In much the same way, I'd argue that the Verdana typeface was a bolder and significantly more distinctive choice compared to something safe and well-trodden like Futura. Despite Verdana's widespread use on the web, approximately nobody had ever dared to use it in the way IKEA did, making it utterly distinctive.
Personally I think IKEA's shift to Noto was disappointing. At their scale they could have easily paid a type designer to make an IKEA Sans, inspired by Verdana, perhaps taking some cues from the likes of Raleway or Suisse Screen.
Heck, even Sweden did it.[0]
[0] https://sharingsweden.se/the-sweden-brand/brand-visual-ident...
1) Overexposure.
Same problem that Georgia has: Otherwise a very serviceable Matthew Carter design.
2) It's a screen font.
In print and display applications, it really does look gross.
Source: A Friendly neighbourhood typographer
> It's a screen font.
With the pixel density of typical displays these days being as high as they are (phones are often 300-400+ PPI), I think this distinction isn't what it used to be.
Two very relevent XKCD comics:
https://xkcd.com/1015/
https://xkcd.com/3113/
Source: someone who picked up a bit of knowledge about typography, but never used it professionally
No curse is worse than having a fine taste for kerning.
Verdana is underrated. It's a legible screen font, and I greatly prefer it to the dreadful spindly font (Segoe UI?) that Windows 11 uses.
Which was recently replaced by Aptos!
Aptos replaced Calibri in Word and Excel.
A terrible mistake.
Wasn't this exactly what people were hating it for? IKEA used it for print and lots of large prints at that, not just pixel displays? I never said or wrote anything about it as far as I can remember, but I do think it looked worse than their previous typeface. Verdana is quite okay, if not good even, for body text.
But it looks like they have changed or customised their typeface recently, the digits and letters like "y" do not look like standard Verdana any more.
These days, Verdana is generally an indicator of either organisational decay or incompetence, especially when used in print, which it wasn’t designed for.
It hasn’t been a default in tools for decades, so it suggests either the organization hasn’t been able to afford to refresh the design for 25 years or the designer is incompetent.
Hate is a strong word, but Verdana is almost certainly the wrong font for your business branding in 2025.
Sometimes, something that seems like an "obviously terrible decision" to subject matter experts turns out to be inconsequential, or perhaps even good. Ask a corporate identity expert in 1998 if you should name your big important company "Google" and they'd vomit in your face. Of course it looks very different in hindsight.
Contrary to your claim, approximately nobody with a professionally designed corporate identity used Verdana in a printed context like IKEA did. It was a "wrong" choice like Google was the "wrong" name for a search engine. It's a perfectly serviceable font, like Times New Roman. And that font was good enough for The Times of London, for goodness sakes.
I appreciate how Slack stuck to their guns (so to speak) with the "swastika made of dicks" controversy.
https://x.com/ItsBadvertising/status/1085972315094044672
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/slack-new-...
I'll never be able to unsee it. At least it doesn't spin.
Previously:
The Scourge of Arial (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10538384 - Nov 2015 (26 comments)
Computer Modern or GTFO! :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern
I'm in love with Concrete Roman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Roman) used in Concrete Mathematics. Let's fight.
Ironically, the article itself uses an Arial-like font. You cannot distinguish the lowercase ell from the uppercase aye. The scourge continues.
Even in the art department, Microsoft ships a shoddy knockoff...
It’s very refreshing to read something about typefaces that isn’t glazing the magnificence of Helvetica!
Helvetica is like vanilla. Often mischaracterised as plain and “default choice”, when done well it’s a distinct taste all of its own. In the hands of a master chef, it can be spectacular. But the majority of it is low effort and low quality.
Yeah basically true; it's described as "neutral" but it absolutely is not.
I have to admit, though, the New Haas revival is so amazingly good that it makes me want to like Helvetica.
Would that be Neue Haas Unica?
So Microsoft's TrueType deal with Apple didn't include the Helvetica TrueType font(s) that Apple included with macOS?
Apple's Geneva seems to be another take on Helvetica, though designed to match the Mac's original bitmap font.
No, since Apple had to license the design/trademark rights from Monotype.
Geneva is a quite different design as evinced by the result of Bigelow & Holmes vector interpretation.
> After all, most people would have trouble telling the difference between a serif and a sans serif typeface.
Surely not after a one minute lecture on what is a serif?
Elitist sounding nonsense.
That poor defenseless font Arial needs Mike Lacher to give it a voice, throw down the gauntlet, and go to the mat in defense of its honor, like he did with Comic Sans!
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole
Now it's getting hammered with Papyrus, which has earned two SNL skits for its appearance in Avatar.
I wonder what font was used on my screen for rendering the article.
Maybe I'm missing a joke here, but if you're actually wondering:
For me it was Proxima Nova.I'm not a web dev. Is what is displayed in the font tab (also Proxima Nova for me) what is actually used on screen? Or does the browser do its own substitutions?
Tbh i expected Helvetica to be specified :)
If you look in Inspect it’ll show “as rendered” somewhere.
As a developer you can tell it what fonts to use, in a a particular order: “my font, closest default font, a windows font that’s ok, anything sans serif” is often what is used.
Browsers can download fonts from the web and use them to display text on web pages. You can Google "Web fonts" to get a lot of info, but basically you just put the font file on your server and the browser downloads it and uses it.
Pair this with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica_(film)
(though it's marred by Arial being passed off for Helvetica in at least one showing)
They are both grotesque fonts -- and that it isn't an insult, that's a technical term!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-serif#Neo-grotesque
Alternatively:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8PdffUfoF0