Arial - Design Characteristics

Design Characteristics

Embedded in version 3.0 of the OpenType version of Arial is the following description of the typeface:

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. The overall treatment of curves is softer and fuller than in most industrial style sans serif faces. Terminal strokes are cut on the diagonal which helps to give the face a less mechanical appearance. Arial is an extremely versatile family of typefaces which can be used with equal success for text setting in reports, presentations, magazines etc, and for display use in newspapers, advertising and promotions

In 2005, Robin Nicholas said "It was designed as a generic sans serif; almost a bland sans serif."

The letter shapes of Arial are based on Monotype Grotesque. Subtle changes and variations were made to both the letterforms and the spacing between characters in order to make it more readable at various resolutions.

The changes cause the typeface to nearly match Linotype Helvetica in both proportion and weight (see figure), and perfectly match in width. Nevertheless, there are differences. One columnist observed "Arial was drawn more rounded than, 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."

The styling of Arabic glyphs comes from Times New Roman, which have more varied stroke widths than the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic glyphs found in the font. Arial Unicode MS uses monotone stroke widths on Arabic glyphs, similar to Tahoma.

The Cyrillic, Greek and Coptic Spacing Modifier Letters glyphs initially introduced in Arial Unicode MS, but later debuted in Arial version 5.00, have different appearances.