#userworf

i thought ariel was the most easy to read font? or am i wrong idk i read that somewhere but i would be Wrong lmao ariel or verdana

okay so i’m gonna font nerd on you for a quick second.

arial is a literal knockoff of helvetica (a helvetica “clone”) to let microsoft use the very popular helvetica but also get around the licensing agreements from helvetica’s font house. this was so they could use it in the original and subsequent releases of microsoft word. 

the two are very close (i love fonts and have looked into how to spot the difference, the a’s for example are in different styles), so the readability advantages that arial has are also the readability advantages that helvetica has, and helvetica is popular in part because of how “friendly” and readable it is.

the reason for this is in part due to helvetica’s “x-height” which is the height between the bottom of the letters that sit on the baseline (so like, the bottom of ‘a’ or ‘s’ and not letters like ‘g’ and ‘j’ that drop below the baseline) to the top of the lowercase letter of that font. the x-height of fonts is usually consistent (excluding letters like ‘f’ and ‘t’ which go above the x-height to around the ‘cap height’, though often they exceed the cap height for stylistic reasons), as you can see in this post i’m typing. (tumblr uses a version of helvetica called helvetica neue, which is also apple’s old iphone font before they stopped wanting to pay for it, but getting into helvetica neue is a different post)

helvetica (and by extension, arial) have tall x-heights, comparatively. fonts like mr. eaves, for example, have shorter x-heights. this is a large reason why fonts in the same point size (12pt, 14pt) can still look like different sizes. large x-heights lend themselves to more “open” and less compact letterforms, which are interpreted as friendlier. they are also easier to read, which is why they work so well in large chunks of body text.

helvetica/arial has the additional advantage of being sans-serif. serifs are the little extra lines and squiggles on the ends of characters. sans-serif fonts don’t have these. serif fonts, like times new roman, do. sans-serif fonts tend to be easier to read at smaller sizes because they have a consistent stroke width, and that stroke width is usually thicker. all the lines in the letters are the same width. that is not the case with serifs; those have thicks and thins in the letter forms, and those thins are the first to fade and become unreadable at small point sizes.

Blogs without people talking abt their life always have more followers. some people just want aesthetic pretty fandom blogs which is BS i love reading about people their life

!!! gasp

ilu !

ahh im so happy everything is going ok and that ur surgery went well!