1

Totally agree, its just plain ugly. I’ve taken some pho­tos of Arial in France, avail­able at my flickr account http://www.flickr.com/photos/designworkplan/sets/72157622406121781/ take a look at the stone build­ing, its hurt­ing my eyes these huge Arial letters…

Sander
November 17th, 2009 at 12:45 pm

2

Nice point about the money.

Youssef Sarhan
November 24th, 2009 at 15:52 pm

3

Agree, but some­times its use­ful when we need to work with text in restricted work space…

Slavik
November 29th, 2009 at 18:35 pm

4

Well, in my very own point of view I think this kind of typog­ra­phy is very com­monly used in coun­tries like Mex­ico because unfor­tu­nately the pre­dom­i­nant oper­at­ing sys­tem as a word proces­sor has the default Arial font. Besides the gov­ern­ment agen­cies in the coun­try are unac­cept­able neg­li­gence in design in gen­eral is con­cerned. Per­son­ally I would have used the font Meta OT
hehe.
I hope this trans­la­tion is under­stand­able because I used the Google trans­la­tor and not that such work. besides that I do not speak Eng­lish or if I speak Span­ish with hard xD jeje.
I hope you visit me in my Twit­ter: http://twitter.com/EricLariz

EricLariz
December 14th, 2009 at 00:03 am

5

I also think that Arial is not a nice font. This text presents a point of view of a very good typog­ra­pher but I know peo­ple who will defend Comic Sans claim­ing that the font is the pret­ti­est in the world:)

Arek
January 15th, 2010 at 09:34 am

6

Oh my god! THEY PUT ARIAL ON MONEY!!??
Im not in the design indus­try and I’m still shocked.

I remem­ber think­ing when watch­ing the movie Hel­vetica when u com­pared Helv to McDon­alds, i was think­ing… if Hel­vetica is McDon­alds, what is Arial… Hos­pi­tal Food?

WBrodie
February 23rd, 2010 at 22:43 pm

7

Whose Hel­vetica does at least as well as Arial in the 8 – 16 pixel height range?

Reynir Heiðberg Stefánsson
April 13th, 2010 at 13:36 pm

8

Sadly, here in Mex­ico, gov­ern­ment offices every­where seem to use only Arial for this type of thing. I can’t explain it…

Kena Kitchengs
August 8th, 2010 at 14:59 pm

9

Dear Erik:

I saw your exam­ples about de use of Arial in some apli­ca­tions like cor­po­ra­tive tipos and oth­ers… your
pic­ture is from Mex­ico city, where all the gov­er­ment per­sonel are sick of bad taste not is the only one …also they uses our dear friend Comic sans for every­thing, and when I said its really all, they uses it that you can imag­ine. I will send you some pictures.

But not all lost, also exists good design, some peo­ple
are try­ing to do a bet­ter typo­graphic world.

My design agency is called Matatena, and we deve­l­ope sig­nage
for cor­po­ra­tions. Matatena is small but it has bigs cos­tumers and
great hearts.

Pic­togramic.

Pictogram
January 25th, 2011 at 17:23 pm