The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Amazon Ember vs Arial
A proprietary humanist brand face against the default neo-grotesque of the office PC. Amazon Ember was drawn by Dalton Maag for Amazon in 2015 and rolled out across Kindle, Echo, and Amazon.com from 2016, while Arial was designed at Monotype in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders to match Helvetica's widths. Both are clean sans-serifs built for screens, but Ember is softer and more open, and Arial is the familiar, slightly mechanical workhorse.
Amazon Ember is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Nunito Sans, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Amazon Ember → Arial is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Arimo, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Arial →
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
- Amazon Ember is a humanist sans with open, friendly forms; Arial is a neo-grotesque whose letterforms descend from Monotype Grotesque and were built to be metrically compatible with Helvetica.
- Arial's terminals are cut on the diagonal and its curves are a little softer than Helvetica's, but its capital I and lowercase l are effectively indistinguishable, a known weakness in UI text.
- Ember ships as a broad system: seven weights plus italics, with separate Condensed and Display families for UI, branding, and headlines.
- Neither is free to use: Ember is owned outright by Amazon and distributed through its developer portal for use with Amazon products rather than sold for general licensing, while Arial is Monotype's property, bundled with Windows and macOS but requiring a paid, pageview-based Monotype webfont license for embedding on the web.
Amazon Ember
Reach for Amazon Ember when you are building inside Amazon's ecosystem, such as an Alexa skill or Fire TV app, where its warm humanist tone and deep weight range are already the house style.
Arial
Reach for Arial when you need a safe, universally installed system sans for documents and Helvetica-width layouts, and you are not paying for a webfont.