Most of the responses here are extremely cringe. Allow me to make a case for this piece:
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.
Agreed with this sentiment. It's a very thoughtful modernization of Arial. A commenter below made me realize that their re-design nicely supports the tabular (monospaced) font variant. Shows attention to detail.
People are free to comment however they like. Luckily we're still living in a world that doesn't default to mindless positive praising.
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.
> It's not satire, just good fun and functionality.
That is a beautiful phrase.
fwiw del.icio.us was helvetica...
All this effort and it's just...Arial. I don't think anyone could see it on a page and guess that it were a different font.
> 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.”
There's clearly a difference.- it says so right in the venn diagram.
Given the types of folks on Are.na, this much energy on a slightly new typeface is very much on-brand for their designer heavy crowd. Know your users!
In other news: are.na still hasn't disabled Introspection on their GraphQL API endpoint
> 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.
Yup, there's a whole ecosystem out there of apps that utilize the are.na api
I’d like to script font that’s just as legible as Arial. I’ve never seen one.
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.
So you say they gave the rights of that new typeface to... Microsoft?
I know!
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.
For fun, here's a gif alternating between their new 'Areal Variable' font and my browser's default Arial:
https://i.imgur.com/B5UcBRK.gif
the difference mainly seems to be spacing?
I can see the stroke width differences that they mention in the article. The lowercase ee in been, the capital S.
Might be placebo, but the text in the article jumped out at me as fresh, clean, and warm. I think they did good work
I do appreciate the spacing attention to ,”
Thanks. This is useful. One Q though, any idea why the 1 in the header is serif? It doesn't seem to in the rest of the doc body.
I hadn't noticed that! Playing with CSS, the Areal font seems to have a serif on that `1` because of this CSS property: `font-feature-settings: "tnum"`. I assume this is some advanced font feature that original Arial doesn't support. Cool to see their attention to detail.
In a world awash in generative nonsense, rebuilding Arial from scratch based on screenshots specifically for Are.na is the flex we deserve and I'm here for it
This is an equivalent of overengineering. Doing the job for the sake of talking about it, without any meaningful, visible or useful benefits. Quite a generic looking font, probably 999/1000 people wouldn't notice it.
a bit nicer to see it here: https://are.al.are.na/
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.
> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading are.al.are.na (see the browser console for more information).
"To find early versions of Arial, the Dinamo team had to work with computer technology archivists to get access to some of the first personal computers and operating systems. In the end they found a tool that allowed them to boot up Windows 2000 on their own laptops"
I hope this "technology archivist" charged them appropriately for this monumental task. /s
TIL that windows 2000 is one of the first PC operating systems.
I was there, 4000 years ago
Username checks out!
The Windows 2000 launch is closer to the release of Altair 8800 than it is to today :/
ah the year 2000, when al gore invented the internet
If you count every Linux distribution released since, and just make the before/after totals, maybe!
The interesting thing is that going by that and by Medea's numbers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45044803), it seems strange that copying from an operating system that was well after WGL4 came out ended up with a glyph list that is significantly short of even WGL4.
By the time that Windows 2000 came out, Arial Unicode had already been published (with Word 2000).
I don’t get it, this is just a font, right? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I understand the need for these announcements but it feels… cringe? Like, it certainly cannot be THAT deep
Most people don't care much about fonts, true. It's fine that you "don't get it".
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.
It's not deep, just really cool!
>but it feels… cringe?
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.
Release notes are good.
"Just a font" is an ignorant statement, and misses the point.
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.
Fonts are extremely hard to make
Wasn't Arial designed to be very Helvetica-like but not having to be licensed? The C# / Java situation of typefaces as it were.
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...
Never heard of Are.na but their aesthetic / interface reminds me a lot of Notion. Given its been around for longer, I wonder if they were inspiration for Notion.
I'd say it's orthogonal to Notion: Notion's design is more "organic" & "human". Are.na chose an aesthetic one could describe as "synthetic" & "industrial".
Both are visually pleasing and share a utilitarian goal, but from different sides of spectrum.
all this effort to copy Arial? which itself is just an alternative to Helvetica.
font licensing is expensive
Isn't Arial is that Microsoft bastardization of Helvetica, to avoid licensing?
Why would you make any derivatives of such a thing.
> A "revival" of Arial
But, Arial has never gone away? It's still usable on my Windows 11.
What they mean is that they made a font by tracing screenshots of the Microsoft deliverable and then tidied it up a bit.
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
I tried to avoid it with the "vibe" bit, because I'm not actually offended by someone remixing a typeface, and I'm also professionally aware of some of the finer points of font licensing.
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.
Preach.
> To find early versions of Arial, the Dinamo team had to work with computer technology archivists to get access to some of the first personal computers and operating systems. In the end they found a tool that allowed them to boot up Windows 2000 on their own laptops and were able to take screenshots of Arial in its initial internet version.
Ohhhhh this is gonna be really hard for me to take seriously isn’t it
I didn't see mention anywhere of a license. I also don't see anywhere to download this from. Is this release equivalent to saying "here is an OFL metric-compatible Arial," or are they releasing it in the sense of "our products will now look like they use Arial, but aside from that this doesn't concern you."?
> I didn't see mention anywhere of a license.
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.
It's 'available' for download here: https://www.are.na/_next/static/media/9844201f12bf51c2-s.p.w...
(but definitely don't think the license permits free use)
I'm digging around to see if it's open source, but I don't think it is
Does anyone know if are.na supports private sharing of content within groups? I’ve looked and I cannot see if this simple thing is possible, or not.
Then I could use it share moodboards and screenshots with my team: I somewhat dislike Miro and all those similarly over-engineered services.
Yes, you can add collaborators to private channels.
And you can group multiple collaborators into groups, to add them to a channel.
Source: premium subscriptions and looked it up in the ui
private groups yes. also can generate shareable links to private channels
So is this what founders do when they're bored with working on their product?
It's a product whose largest cohort is designers or design-minded people. Them focusing on that as part of the product itself feels like a perfectly good use of their time.
> It's a product whose largest cohort is designers or design-minded people.
Those people are not clamouring for another Arial.
No one said they were, I don't even think this font is available for use outside of are.na's product. This is about craft.
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.”And yet Arial Nova exists, as pointed out at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45046490 .
Tbh it kinda feels like that legendary Pepsi BREATHTAKING Design Strategy from 2008
https://archive.org/details/breathtaking-design-strategy-pep...
Why didn't they just go with Arial Nova instead?
Or Liberation Sans
https://www.oooninja.com/2008/02/metrical-equivalent-fonts-a...
How is Areal different from Arial? Neither the article nor https://are.al.are.na/ seem to be informative and focused on this.
https://are.al.are.na/ does include some information on what they changed after tracing the original.
Might as well just quote the one single sentence that gives any specific details:
> Stem thicknesses were streamlined, more characters added, a monospace version drawn, dark mode functionality optimized.
The first question that I always want answered when learning of a new font is how much of Unicode it covers. It a question rarely answered by "We have made a new font." blurbs, though.
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.
It contains 475 glyphs in total, including 13 diacritics for the letter A. The set includes most Latin characters, but does not cover Greek or Cyrillic
That's well short of even WGL4, and must lack a fair whack somewhere else in addition to Greek and Cyrillic if it's only 475.
Some of these diagrams are verging on parody. This: https://www.are.na/block/38883495
reads almost exactly like this: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/Uz8PzDN8F2Dpcng9u33GJg-970...
Some of that kerning looks pretty terrible.
The version on the right side of the “proportion” axis is monospaced.
Impact or go home font dorks
The whole time reading this, I literally couldn't tell if it was serious or a parody.
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?
Agreed -- in that I also don't know, and am slightly peeved at the time I spent reading the page, then re-reading it to see if I missed the point, then going to are.na to see what exactly they do, the re-reading that page and still being none the wiser.
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.
it's nice
The horizontal line on the "t" is absurdly small, it's hard to distinguish it from other slim tall characters.
I don't know about anyone else, but for me at least, in 2025, it's hard to view a company not only making a bespoke typeface but going out of their way to write a press release about said bespoke typeface as anything other than a signal that said company's designers are high off their ass from huffing their own farts, to the point where users should be concerned about the longevity of said company.
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.
I wish English had a word for this social media thing,
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.
Wait until TIL how fonts and font foundries have been more or less crudely recasting typefaces for several hundred years. Since headlines were placed on the first print text.
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 =)
Is this an intentional joke or an accidental joke?
I genuinely couldn’t tell.
So... Helvetica?
Derelicte.
