Areal, Are.na's new typeface
are.na
are.na
Are.na is a 12+ year old online community primarily for artists and designers. The developers have been able to keep the community high quality and fresh by consistently making tasteful choices—everything from not running ads to ignoring design trends and avoiding attention-jacking.
There have been many, many clones, and you'll find that they seldom last or stay interesting to their core audiences.
Their usage of Arial is a throwback to their roots (in early del.icio.us and websurfing culture), and works well for the intended purpose of allowing the website to take a back seat to the content. From my perspective, it feels both "cool"—irreverent, contextually aware—and functional, and as such I think it's both a great brand move and a great design move.
Now: imagine you're building a product over decades, and you're committed to using a font that's old, limited and owned by Microsoft. No monospace version. Limited character set. No modern features like variable weights. And someone comes along and is like: "I'd love to re-draw the font so that you can have modern features, a clear license that's tailored to your needs, and as a bonus it'll be a great story and we can write an article about the process for marketing."
"We re-drew Arial." Hilarious! And what's more, we have more degrees of freedom for future designs, and maybe the font looks just slightly better.
That's what happening here. It's not satire, just good fun and functionality.
That is a beautiful phrase.
You can count me among the other cringsters but I'm not buying this. It's just a slightly changed Arial with added pseudo-intelligent "reinventing" justification.
This is exactly how many software projects start.
In other news: are.na still hasn't disabled Introspection on their GraphQL API endpoint
I would not be surprised if this is intentional. The Are.na REST API is extremely permissive too.
From TFA:
Personally, Arial has always had a pretty positive connotation for me. In the late ’90s/early 2000s web design scene, there were no custom fonts, so your choices were basically Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, and a few other default fonts. Arial always struck me as the most plain and the least snobby choice. You know, in the early 2000s Helvetica was the first font that I watched become very cool and then kind of cringey within a very short lifecycle. Helvetica was like an Eames chair or something — a shorthand for people to say “I'm interested in design,” which then became lame almost immediately afterwards. But Arial has always been kind of lame [laughs]. In that way, it’s stayed the same.
I miss reading and writing cursive, but want the clarity of print. I don’t want flourishes, don’t want big ballooning lines, don’t want wacky out-of-place letters, it needs to flow, and needs to be connected in a natural way.
> With Areal, Dinamo designed an updated version of Arial especially suited for Are.na, but which still honors the original. Stem thicknesses were streamlined, more characters added (), a monospace version drawn, dark mode functionality optimized. You probably wouldn’t have noticed these changes if you hadn’t read this statement. It’s possible you still won’t. But to us (Are.na and Dinamo) Areal’s existence is satisfying in the way that rewriting an entire front-end is satisfying. As stated in this text block from 5 years ago, “the reason you would create something is because you love it enough to see it exist.”
If you make a typeface by overdrawing different typeface it's completely ok. Even calling it Areal.
https://i.imgur.com/B5UcBRK.gif
the difference mainly seems to be spacing?
Might be placebo, but the text in the article jumped out at me as fresh, clean, and warm. I think they did good work
Dinamo is most hyped top tier foundry that just understands that they can make more money by focusing on high end luxury clients. So the licensing is ained at them so they won't leave money on the table.
Arial is the gateway drug to Helvetica. Pretty soon you're debating the relative merits of Johnston Sans to Akzidenz Grotesk to Univers to DIN 1451 to Bahnschrift to Overpass...
Anyway - Arial has a certain charm, and I know that normcore 90's web design has had a resurgence in the past decade. And I am an Are.na user. But even still, I don't really get why one would go to such lengths to recreate something that is the typeface version of a polo and khakis...
Where as Untitled is trying to make even Arial more "super normal" i think this Areal typeface is in turn trying to keep the quirks and the nostalgia. In the end it is very subtle and the real reason for creating Areal is for sure customization and licensing issues.
But you just won't get the same result by copying Helvetica. Also Helvetica itself is not one typeface. There are many slightly different versions of Helveticas, with different names and redesigns. Some people will tell you why copy Helvetica when its just a bad copy of Akzidenz-Grotesk or original Neue Haas Grotesk.
Type people are obsessive and recreating typeface takes real skill and enormous amount time of time (even if you want to just copy). I think the authors know why they are dedicating the time to do it.
reads almost exactly like this: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/Uz8PzDN8F2Dpcng9u33GJg-970...
https://media1.tenor.com/m/RFe1swp-ZwkAAAAd/diablo-joke.gif
Arial, really? Arial?
It's just an easy way to show a bunch of different variations of a thing when they cleanly split across properties and those properties commute.
It's good its just, I don't know, its precisely what it says it is. A refresh of Arial. It's nice. If they didn't say anything I would think they just fussed with the letter spacing a bit and didn't create a new font at all. That seems like the biggest change.
The monospace is neat.
I hope this "technology archivist" charged them appropriately for this monumental task. /s
By the time that Windows 2000 came out, Arial Unicode had already been published (with Word 2000).
(but definitely don't think the license permits free use)
This page, which is poorly designed¹ to the point that it supports the idea that this is all an in-joke rather than the work of pros, appears to suggest that this is a purely commercial work: https://abcdinamo.com/licenses
¹ Seen while scanning: (1) Scroll down, then up. Boo. (2) Leading cramped beyond "style preference". (3) Bulleted list badly styled in a way that requires work. (4) No attention paid to tracking where it's needed (e.g. small all-caps type). (5) Some terms (e.g. "First Designer") capitalized inconsistently. (6) '&' used in body copy.
Behind every (well-designed) font is a world of typography. That's an entire industry at the intersection of science and art. Type designers take great pride in their work, and well-designed typefaces are practically timeless. Like good art, they transmit emotion. As a commercial product, they represent brands. A lot hinges on choosing the right type for a specific purpose, even if most of the general public is not consciously aware of it. So these announcements can indeed be deep and meaningful.
That said, the changes in this case seem very minor to me, as a casual type aficionado. I could barely tell the difference from Arial with both side by side, but I'm sure a lot of thought and effort went into this. Maybe it was worth avoiding the licensing costs? I wasn't aware Arial required licensing, though.
Another good reason to do this is to have a baseline font from which they can create different variants, or add new characters. This is probably why they were able to make so many proportions, weights, and slants. I don't remember Arial having a monospace variant, for example.
You actually have to license the typeface for many usecases. Even as a web service they were probably licensing webfont because Arial is not available on all systems so your Androids and Linuxes would see different font.
And yes the biggest reason to do this is to make your own tweaks without bumping into licensing issues.
are people nowadays unable to be enthusiastic about anything without someone chiming in from the peanut gallery and calling it "cringe"?
Typefaces have always had a pretty passionate community, it can be surprisingly deep. A lot of people love and invest a lot of time in fonts and frankly paying some attention to design even if it isn't necessarily apparent is by no means a bad thing.
But yes, it can be that deep - typography and font design is a very underappreciated field. Fonts don't just come from nowhere - someone has to sit down and design them, and it takes a lot of time and effort.
Both are visually pleasing and share a utilitarian goal, but from different sides of spectrum.
Ohhhhh this is gonna be really hard for me to take seriously isn’t it
Why would you make any derivatives of such a thing.
> Stem thicknesses were streamlined, more characters added, a monospace version drawn, dark mode functionality optimized.
But, Arial has never gone away? It's still usable on my Windows 11.
I'm aware copyright and fonts is a loaded topic, and I'm not advocating for a hardline stance, and making metrics-compatible free replacement fonts has always been a thing (I mean, that's what Arial itself is), but vibe-wise this is like when you steal your competitor's design and call it a "revival".
Along with the Windows 2000 sound bite, by god what a smarmy and off-putting deluge of ego-junk. My interest in their product certainly died.
I'm not advocating for a hardline stance
What I am responding negatively to is the communication style of this announcement. There's a lot of myth-making here, and calling it a revival, to aggrandize what just comes down to "we really like Arial for what we do, and we wanted a cleaned-up version of it that we own and could host on the web".
For one, if it was a true, spirited revival it'd be nice if it was a revival for anyone else as well, given how widely available Arial is. But as far as I can tell, they haven't published it for outside use anywhere, so it may well perish with the single website it's found on. Actual Arial will handily outlive this.
Those people are not clamouring for another Arial.
I think they said it pretty well themselves:
With Areal, Dinamo designed an updated version of Arial especially suited for Are.na, but which still honors the original. Stem thicknesses were streamlined, more characters added (), a monospace version drawn, dark mode functionality optimized. You probably wouldn’t have noticed these changes if you hadn’t read this statement. It’s possible you still won’t. But to us (Are.na and Dinamo) Areal’s existence is satisfying in the way that rewriting an entire front-end is satisfying. As stated in this text block from 5 years ago, “the reason you would create something is because you love it enough to see it exist.”https://archive.org/details/breathtaking-design-strategy-pep...
https://www.oooninja.com/2008/02/metrical-equivalent-fonts-a...
Then I could use it share moodboards and screenshots with my team: I somewhat dislike Miro and all those similarly over-engineered services.
And you can group multiple collaborators into groups, to add them to a channel.
Source: premium subscriptions and looked it up in the ui
Yes, yes; it's aesthetically pleasing, satisfies some set of geometric rules that you say fonts should satisfy, and smells of fresh lemons or whatever. But I want to know what happens when I put a diacritic on that letter "a". Is my system going to fall back to a different font?
Given that there are WGL4 and Unicode variants of Arial, it is a particularly apposite unanswered question here.
Trebuchet MS, anyone? That was my favorite to design with when I was younger.
Now I accept they actually redrew this font, I still can't tell if it's meant as a big ironic joke or some kind of sincere artistic improvement? Or both?
They copied a font? Okay, I guess? Yeah licensing yadda yadda. And yeah, doing The Thing for the experience of doing The Thing. But really... talk about burying the lede. The article is not only indistinguishable from parody but comes across as self-congratulatory navel-gazing.
And are.na is... some kinda social snippet/meme sharing? Kinda? Ooookaaaay...?
I don't like being negative, here or anywhere. After all, these are real people doing real stuff, and presumably they're proud of their hard work and could do with a pat on the back just like everyone else. But maaaaan.... I honestly have no idea how it's okay to spend subscribers' money on 'refreshing' a near-ubiquitous font then posting about it in this manner.
So, in the spirit of constructive criticism, I'd suggest ripping out the interviews, replacing it with an article that makes a compelling case about why this was done. Even if it amounts to an art project any artist worth their salt can make an engaging case for what they're doing and why.
But clearly I'm not the target audience. So if font nerds here enjoy this sort of article, I guess there's one reason I'm not a font nerd.
where headlines—especially when mechanically reproduced—presuppose you have some context or care for something that is in fact of interest to and targeted to a specific [user] community.
Are.na... OK, I guess it's a note taking and memory organization thing for productivitymaxers or whatever. TIL.
Areal, a license-free recasting of Arial, itself a license-free crude recasting of Helvetica... OK. TIL.
I dunno, in this orange site context it makes perfect sense that one would assume interest, however thin.
Typography designer missus next to me is rolling her eyes at this - not a fan of Dinamo font work =)
I genuinely couldn’t tell.
Doubly so when said company's product is a website rather than an app such that users must redownload said typeface every time they clear their cache.
Quadruply so when said typeface is self-admittedly practically indistinguishable from Arial.