A for Arial
The curious history of a font from the heyday of Microsoft Word
Here’s one for Ripley’s Believe It or Not: Arial was once called Sonoran San Serif.
How different would the user experience of Microsoft Word been if the name had not been changed? Would we even have known about Arial if it hadn’t been one of the very first fonts on offer in the drop-down menu?
Arial was designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders for the type foundry Monotype. It was first packaged for the personal computer with Windows 3.1 in 1992 (along with a much more important feature: Minesweeper). As a sans serif font, it also described as “grotesque” (for a meandering discussion on why fonts without serifs are called grotesque you can read my post on “The Serif”). Today, Windows people, I am reliably informed, prefer Calibri. I have no idea about this because I came into some money a decade ago, and have been a Mac and Scrivener user since then. However, I just did a quick check, and can confirm that the default font in Pages is Helvetica. Curiouser and curiouser, dear reader, for as we will soon find out, this is no random occurrence.
The typographer Mark Simonson recounts the evolution of the typeface in a wonderful entry in his online journal titled “The Scourge of Arial”. Simonson argues that Arial’s ubiquitousness…
