True to type

Forthcoming changes to the BBC News website will mean farewell to Verdana, a typeface designed by the pre-eminent British typographer Matthew Carter in 1994 at Microsoft's behest, specifically for improved on-screen legibility,. The BBC design committee/design police have gone for a mixture of Gill Sans, Helvetica and Arial across all sites.

Robin Nicholas developed the early version of Arial in 1982, for IBM bitmap font laser printers, in the Monotype Drawing Office and went on to develop it further with Patricia Saunders, into the Arial typeface family - later chosen by Microsoft as a core font for Windows 3.1 (and subsequent versions).

Helvetica came from Swiss typographer Max Meidinger in 1957, and it's often hard to distinguish it from Arial.

Gills Sans first appeared as a bookshop sign in Bristol in 1926, when Eric Gill handpainted the fascia. The shop, at 18 Charlotte Street, was owned by Douglas Cleverdon, later a BBC radio producer, and creator of the Brain's Trust. Gill later developed his characters into a font family which was released by the Monotype Corporation in 1928.