Emmanuel Quartey

In Praise of Arial

Can we talk about how Arial gets no love? In the hierarchy of typefaces, it’s not quite Papyrus/Comic Sans-grade, but I doubt anyone is going to be making a documentary about it anytime soon.

Arial is easy to ignore. I only started actually looking at it recently, when I threw it in as a filler type for something I was working on. The image above is a fictional concert poster I made for a friend, done entirely in Arial and Archer (yes, I know. hush).

Is anyone using Arial in an interesting way? I genuinely believe that there’s an opportunity to do something really cool here. I would love to see some examples.