Helvetica had been very popular lately with it's birthday being on May 9th and written up on the BBC News. It is now featured on Business Week with a article about it's use in well established logos.

"Every typeface is made to solve some type of problem. They're design tools. Helvetica wasn't designed with anything specific in mind. It was designed to be a jack of all trades," observes Tobias Frere-Jones, director of typography at Hoefler & Frere-Jones in New York, and critic at Yale University School of Art.

Labels: Helvetica, typefaces, typography

Once there was a typeface called Helvetica.
It was extremely popular.
Later came a software company called Microsoft.
They "borrowed" Helvetica for their operating system and called it Arial.
This inferior typeface is now on millions of desktops all over the world.
Can you tell the difference between the original and the rip-off in these ten examples?

Labels: Arial, Helvetica, typefaces, typography