

Terminal strokes are cut on the diagonal which helps to give the face a less mechanical appearance. The overall treatment of curves is softer and fuller than in most industrial style sans serif faces. Arial copies Helvetica's proportions and stroke width but has design detailing influenced by Grotesque 215.Įmbedded in version 3.0 of the OpenType version of Arial is the following description of the typeface:Ī contemporary sans serif design, Arial contains more humanist characteristics than many of its predecessors and as such is more in tune with the mood of the last decades of the twentieth century. In Office 2007, Arial was replaced by Calibri as the default typeface in PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook.ĭesign characteristics A comparison of Arial, Helvetica and Monotype Grotesque 215 scaled to equivalent cap height showing the most distinctive characters. More recently, Arial Rounded has also been widely bundled. The most widely used and bundled Arial fonts are Arial Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic the same styles of Arial Narrow and Arial Black. Because of their similar appearance, both Arial and Helvetica are commonly mistaken for each other. Įach of its characters has the same width as that character in the popular typeface Helvetica the purpose of this design is to allow a document designed in Helvetica to be displayed and printed with the intended line-breaks and page-breaks without a Helvetica license. The typeface was designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders, for Monotype Typography.

Fonts from the Arial family are included with all versions of Microsoft Windows after Windows 3.1, as well as in other Microsoft programs, Apple's macOS, and many PostScript 3 printers. Arial (also called Arial MT) is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts in the neo-grotesque style.
