Monotype Grotesque

071012

It seems like I can’t talk about Helvetica without mentioning Arial (again), so today I’m going to talk about Monotype Grotesque. And then we’ll get back to Helvetica and the sniggering at the capital R can continue. First of all, a comparison of Arial and Monotype Grotesque:

Apart from a few variations in the strokes, character spacing and proportions they’re pretty similar. Arial was based upon Monotype Grotesque; tweaked to look better on screen and for printing from laser printers (as far I can tell anyway, it’s quite hard to find anything about Arial in typography books, they get all sniffy about it). Now here’s where it gets typographically interesting; this new Arial with its tweaked spacing and proportions, just so happened to very closely match the spacing and proportions of Helvetica. And then a certain Microsoft adopted it as their default sans-serif and from then on, rightly or wrongly, Arial was stuck with a reputation as a cheap Helvetica knock-off.

One more thing…