Schools using Arial

While many fonts are labors of love for one individual designer, Arial was a 10-person effort. Designed by the Monotype Corporation in 1982, the project was led by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders. In 2005, Robin Nicholas said of Arial, "It was designed as a generic sans serif; almost a bland sans serif." It is extremely similar to Helvetica, and many letters in Arial and Helvetica look identical to the naked eye. Some of the key differentiators are the design of the uppercase R, the tail of the lowercase a, and the spur on the uppercase G. Many designers today find Arial to be a poor approximation for Helvetica, and will use Helvetica whenever they can. That's not always an option, though, as American type designer Mark Simonson points out: "The situation today is that Arial has displaced Helvetica as the standard font in practically everything done by nonprofessionals in print, on television, and on the Web, where it's become a standard font, mostly because of Microsoft bundling it with everything - even for Macs, which already come with Helvetica."

5766 Schools using Arial

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Arial

School Site Evaluation (Arial)

Of the 41 fonts used for evaluation, the most common font schools use on their websites is Arial. Arial is used on websites by 5,766 schools around the US.

Visual Preferences

Color

Nearly 64.6% of schools that use Arial as the primary font on their websites use the color white as the primary color on the website, including Miami Dade College, Houston Community College and University of Central Florida. The other primary website colors that are most commonly used by schools that use Arial as the primary font on their website include grey (12.8%) and black (9.8%).


Social Presence

Exactly 1,540 schools that use Arial as the primary font on their websites have Facebook pages. These schools tend to update their Facebook status, on average, 4 times a week. And they each have an average of 5,421 "likes". Of the schools that use the Arial font, the following have the greatest number of Facebook "likes":

  1. University of Michigan - Ann Arbor: 359,331 likes
  2. Texas A & M University - College Station: 293,645 likes
  3. University of Kentucky: 255,588 likes

And 959 schools that use Arial as the primary font on their websites have YouTube channels. These schools have an average YouTube subscriber base of 238 subscribers, and an average of 74 posted videos. Of these schools, the following have the greatest number of YouTube subscribers:

  1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 113,180 subscribers
  2. Musicians Institute: 3,977 subscribers
  3. University of Southern California: 3,537 subscribers

Web Metrics

The average Google Page Rank for schools using Arial as the primary font on their websites is 5. Interestingly enough, the average Google Page Rank for schools that do not use Arial on their websites is 5.

The schools with the highest Google Page Rank, that also use Arial on their websites are:

  1. Rutgers University - Camden: 9 Google Page Rank
  2. Purdue University - Main Campus: 9 Google Page Rank
  3. Rutgers University - Newark: 9 Google Page Rank
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