Sans for its signs and menus (as I once encountered in the Lake District) is similarly attention-grabbing for a graphic designer. posted by malevolent at 12:45 AM on November 16, 2009 I regularly drive past this church and can't help but admire the audacity of the big red Comic Sans sign outside. They carry the branding through to their website too. Back when I was younger, my company landed the gig for moving our country's telco's (Telstra) annual report online. This had never been done, and we were breaking new ground. We received the word documents of the report, and I diligently set about hand coding it into HTML- opting for Arial. We FTP'd it up to the server and waited for the response- which was... "We don't like the 'j' you've used". So what IS the difference between Arial and Helvetica? I mean, I can see differences when I look at them side-by-side, but what makes one better than the other to a designer's eye? Typography's all about black and white. Contrast. The shapes of the characters aren't the most important thing, it's how they all fit together on the page. Arial is a passable typeface, but Helvetica is perfection. Arial's key flaw is that it's a knockoff: instead of cloning Helvetica directly, they copied 95% of it and improvised the remainder. This is an unnatural design process that lends itself to inconsistency and awkwardness: inconsistency and awkwardness that you can see with just a quick look at some