Is Arial a Plagiarism of Helvetica?

For aficionados of typefaces, whether amateur or professional, details are incredibly important.

Even the smallest differences between two typefaces can spark heated conversations about usability, legibility, aesthetics and flexibility.

However, almost no issue has sparked more passion in the community than the war between Arial and Helvetica. This battle, which goes back over 40 years, predates not only the Internet but also desktop publishing.

Some feel that Arial is a cheap knockoff or plagiarism of Helvetica. Others, however, are angry that it didn’t copy Helvetica more closely. Still, others think that both should only be used for limited purposes.

It’s a war over the typefaces and fonts that are the defaults on the Internet, and according to many designers, the internet went down the wrong path.

So, we will examine whether Arial is a plagiarism of Helvetica and, if it is, why it never became a legal issue.

However, to do that, we must first go back to the 1950s.

A (Very) Brief History of Helvetica vs. Arial

Note: This section of the article is based heavily on a 2001 article by Mark Simonson and a 2021 article by Shubham Kulkarni at Simplified. Both go into much greater detail about the history of the fonts than we can here. If you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend reading both.

The Haas Foundry of Switzerland developed Helvetica in the 1950s. The company later merged with Linotype, and the typeface was available exclusively to users of Linotype typesetting machines. However, other manufacturers quickly created their own “Helvetica clones” to offer their customers.

In the 1960s, Helvetica began to grow in popularity among designers. It was seen as clean and modern, and it began to see widespread use in advertisements, posters and other works. Though that popularity began to wane in the 70s, it had become a font for everyday use. It went from being an art font to being a workhorse for designers.

In 1982, Monotype, a competitor of Linotype, developed Sonoran San Serif, the font that would later become Arial. It was based heavily on Monotype’s Grotesque designs, in particular New Grotesque, a Monotype-created typeface that strongly resembled Helvetica.

At that same time, Monotype had an IBM contract to produce bitmap fonts for in-office printing machines. In 1990, they developed a TrueType version of Arial that was licensed to Microsoft. In 1992, the company selected Arial as one of the four core TrueType typefaces in Windows 3.1, even saying that the font was an “alternative to Helvetica.”

Helvetica had a similar arc. In the 1980s, Linotype partnered with Adobe to create typefaces for their PostScript system. It became popular in Adobe-created products such as PageMaker. Though some versions of the typeface were licensed, Adobe tried to keep the best versions to themselves for their products.

Thus, when releasing Windows 3.1, Microsoft chose Arial to avoid paying a licensing fee for Helvetica. That ended up being the pivotal moment.

With Arial in every Windows machine, it became the default Helvetica-like font for anyone using the operating system. That became even more important with the rise of the Internet when Arial was considered a “web-safe font,” and Helvetica was not.

Even today, Helvetica is only available on 7.34% of Windows machines. Meanwhile, other sans-serif fonts like Verdana, Trebuchet and Arial are available on well over 95% of both Windows and Mac systems.

How it Happened and Why it Matters

The answer to how it happened is fairly straightforward. In the United States, there is no copyright protection for a typeface. Though you can protect the software that installs the typeface on the computer, there’s nothing preventing the creation of knock-off typefaces.

This has been the case for a long time. As noted above, there were Helvetica clones well before there were desktop computers. As Simonson noted, it’s likely that most of the “Helvetica” seen in the 1970s heyday was not actually Helvetica at all.

In short, there was nothing to stop Monotype from creating its own Helvetica clone and then licensing the software version to Microsoft at a lower rate. As long as they didn’t use the Helvetica name or the software that Linotype created, there wasn’t much that could be done.

But that’s not exactly what happened. As Kulkarni noted, Arial is not a true Helvetica clone. There are many differences between the two. The problem is that those differences are not immediately evident on monitors, where the resolution is often lower, or in small print.

To many designers, Arial is an inferior typeface that came out on top based not on the merit of the typography but by being a cheaper alternative. Though Helvetica seems to have fallen out of favor for many uses, Arial is still seen as being even worse.

While this is admittedly subjective, it’s interesting that many consider Arial a plagiarism of Helvetica. Yet, their biggest complaint is that it didn’t plagiarize it enough.

It’s a strange standard that shows typography’s unique nature as an art and a practical tool.

Bottom Line

So, is Arial a plagiarism of Helvetica? From a purely practical standpoint, it would likely be considered one. It clearly and deliberately aped Helvetica and did so without clear attribution.

However, from an ethical and legal standpoint, things get murkier. Legally, there is no copyright infringement here. Typefaces can’t be protected by copyright in the United States and only enjoy limited protection elsewhere. As we’ve seen, many others created their own Helvetica clones, and those raised no ethical or legal issues.

Two things make Arial controversial. First, it didn’t mimic Helvetica close enough to be a true drop-in replacement. Second, it became the de facto standard largely due to licensing deals.

The fact that Helvetica is so beloved 70 years after it was originally developed speaks volumes both about the typeface’s quality and its adaptability. However, what ultimately supplanted it wasn’t necessarily a better product but a better business approach.

To that end, it wasn’t the first piece of tech to fall victim to that, and it likely won’t be the last.