81–90 of 184 posts
The MATTEL one was hard, but I just assumed the one with crappy kerning was Arial, and sure enough...
This was just something I noticed for the first time while going through.
This question is good for seeing whether people know what they're looking at, but the point of using one font over the other isn't to show you prefer the 'correct' font, but to be invisibly better than other choices in one way or another.
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I don't feel this subtle difference. Take a look: http://imgur.com/CWJWvZk Does this feel different? I can see the slanted Arial terminations but I don't "feel" the different mood.
Hypothesis: The difference in feeling that some people get from fonts is like the difference in feeling many people get when they pay a lot for the wine they drink. It's subconscious. It feels like a real feeling. It just isn't driven by the actual experience of the product. In the wine world, it is possible to isolate this effect using blind taste tests. In the font world, there seems to be no robust way to show a f…
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That is almost the exact experience I had. I got 17/20 and the ones I screwed up all had capital letters. I couldn't see any difference between Mattel and Toyota.
The perfectly round "O" was the giveaway for me. Helvetica just feels more "literal" to me, if that makes any sense, with its perfectly horizontal endings on "C" and "S" and "t", so the round "O" seemed more likely. Mattel nearly tripped me up too, but I noticed that Helvetica was bolder throughout than the Arial equivalent, so it wasn't hard.
A much more interesting question than "Arial or Helvetica" would be: "Which one looks better?" Then you could ask how well the answer correlated with Helvetica vs Arial. This question is good for seeing whether people know what they're looking at, but the point of using one font over the other isn't to show you prefer the 'correct' font, but to be invisibly better than other choices in one way or another.
I got 17/20 correct with that method.
I got 19/20. Messed up on "STAPLES" because I got over-confident and started selecting too quickly by the end.
The easiest way to distinguish the two, in my opinion, is that Helvetica uses horizontal cuts to letter strokes. So I should have seen that the capital 'S' in STAPLES had slightly off-axis cuts in my selection. Perhaps what tricked me is that the STAPLES logo itself is off-axis.