Mr. Simonson, who sells original fonts on his Web site, is the author of an online article called "The Scourge of Arial."
Arial, he explains, is a bad imitation of Helvetica. "At a glance, it looks like Helvetica, but up close it's different in dozens of seemingly arbitrary ways." What's odd, he writes, is that an exact copy of that typeface could have been made with no legal consequences because only the names of fonts are really protected.

The best work [a recent graphic design graduate] showed [Michael Bierut, a partner at the graphic design firm Pentagram] was her design for an imaginary CD package. "All of it was Futura Bold Italic, knocked out in white in bright red bands, set on top of black and white halftones," he said. "Naturally, it looked great. Naturally, I asked, 'So, why were you going for a Barbara Kruger kind of thing here?' "

She said, "Who's Barbara Kruger?" He said, "Um, Barbara Kruger is an artist who is, um, pretty well known for doing work that, well, looks exactly like this." She said, "Really? I've never heard of her."