If you don’t know Arial, you don’t use a modern personal computer. And if you do, whether it’s a PC or Mac hardly matters—if you use Microsoft products, Arial is the typeface that continually calls out to you from the font menu.

While it may be the face designers love to hate, Arial is arguably the most-used sans serif in the world, eclipsing both Helvetica and Frutiger. And while many designers would contend that Arial has already been dead for a long time, they’re just anxious. For now, Arial is everywhere.

TYPE COMES TO LASER PRINTERS
Many believe that it is because of Microsoft that Arial was first produced. Actually, the face was originally drawn for another computer giant.

In the early 1980s Xerox and IBM introduced the first big laserxerographic printers. These were huge machines, closer in size to a truck than the diminutive offspring we use today. Xerox and IBM wanted more in the way of type for their new machines than typefaces imitating customary monospaced all-cap strike-on data processing fonts (read: Courier and Letter Gothic). They also wanted “typographic” fonts.

The two type companies that bid on the contracts to provide these fonts to Xerox and IBM were Linotype and Monotype. At the time, the most popular typefaces in North America were Times New Roman and Helvetica. Linotype and Monotype had shared rights to Times New Roman from its introduction 50 years earlier, but Monotype did not have rights to Helvetica. Linotype won the contract with Xerox. Monotype pursued IBM. To be successful, however, it needed a viable competitor to Helvetica.

DESIGN FOUNDATION
Monotype’s answer was based on Monotype Grotesque, a type design first drawn at the turn of the 20th century. While the goal of its design program was to create a competitor to Helvetica, Monotype did not want to copy the design. Arial was drawn more rounded than its rival, the curves softer and fuller and the counters more open. The ends of the strokes on letters such as c, e, g and s, rather than being cut off on the horizontal, are terminated at the more natural angle in relation to the stroke direction.

THUS FAR, DOCUMENTATION ON MICROSOFT’S NEW CLEARTYPE FONT COLLECTION IS LIMITED TO NOW READ THIS, A HARD-TO-OBTAIN PUBLICATION FROM MICROSOFT PRESS. THE BOOK RECOUNTS THE CREATION STORIES OF THE FIVE NEW FONTS THAT MAKE UP THE COLLECTION, WITH TECHNICAL DETAILS ON THE FONTS AND THE TESTING PROCESS USED TO PROVE THEIR UTILITY. BUT THE QUESTION OF WHETHER ONE OF THE FIVE FONTS, CALIBRI, WILL REPLACE THE UBIQUITOUS ARIAL REMAINS OPEN.

When first produced for IBM, the Arial typeface did not wear the name it goes by today. It was called Sonoran San Serif. Times New Roman was Sonoran Serif. This was because the first big laserxerographic printers were developed at IBM’s manufacturing facilities in Tucson, Ariz., and the typefaces were named for the region.

ARIAL COMES TO MICROSOFT
It wasn’t until almost a decade later that Sonoran Sans became Arial. Microsoft wanted TrueType fonts for its new Windows 3.1 operating system. Monotype was chosen to provide these fonts … perhaps because of the company’s close relationship with IBM, or maybe because Monotype had the most skill in developing True-Type fonts. It was not, as some have suggested, that Microsoft did not want to pay for Helvetica. The money the software giant has paid over the years for the development of Arial could finance a small country.

ARIAL, WE HARDLY KNEW YOU
But all this is history. Now the future of Arial may be in peril—and not because millions of Microsoft Office users have “seen the typographic light.” The reason is, instead, that Microsoft has switched its loyalty to a whole new set of fonts. When the company released Vista, its new operating system, it included a new suite of fonts specifically designed for that OS. According to Microsoft, it wants computer users—well, actually just Microsoft users—to have a more enjoyable onscreen reading experience.

The new font suite, called the ClearType Font Collection, incorporates improved imaging and OpenType technologies and is based on a raft of design research intended to improve the structure and clarity of the letterforms for onscreen reading. The new font suite includes two serif faces, three sans serif faces and a monospaced face (the last is for use in programming environments). The new designs go by the names of Constantia, Cambria, Corbel, Candara, Calibri and Consolas, sometimes known as the “C Fonts.” Microsoft has so much faith in these designs that it has replaced the old Office default fonts with a new one from this set. Calibri, designed by Dutch designer Luc(as) de Groot, has become the new Arial.

Calibri is an affable sans serif design and benefits from a “cursive” italic rather than the more common “obliqued” roman found in Arial, Univers and Helvetica. It also has a squarer quality than these designs. The shoulders and bowls of the lowercase are boxy, giving the design somewhat of a vertical stress. Even the cursive italics have this slightly boxy feeling. While this quality helps the design image well on LCD screens, it does not necessarily improve the reading process over designs with more built-in horizontality (design stress that helps move the eye along a horizontal line of copy). Calibri may be clearer on screen, but is it easier to read?

Calibri is also the only typeface in the new font collection that is appropriate for use both in text and larger headline sizes. Cambria and Candara, for example, are primarily intended for setting text. In Microsoft’s promotional booklet for the new typefaces, Now Read This, de Groot says of his design, “Its proportions allow high impact in tightly set lines of big and small type alike.” To this he adds, “The family has a generous width that makes reading easier by emphasizing the reading direction.”

But will Calibri replace Arial—or even Helvetica? Can the sheer power of Microsoft change the typographic habits of the world? Or, to paraphrase Mark Twain, are the reports of Arial’s death greatly exaggerated?

All images in this article are excerpted from Now Read This: The Microsoft ClearType Font Collection, published by Microsoft Press in 2004.