Areal, Are.na's New Typeface

I hope this "technology archivist" charged them appropriately for this monumental task. /s

Both are visually pleasing and share a utilitarian goal, but from different sides of spectrum.

In other news: are.na still hasn't disabled Introspection on their GraphQL API endpoint

> 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.”

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.

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.

And you can group multiple collaborators into groups, to add them to a channel.

Source: premium subscriptions and looked it up in the ui

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.

https://archive.org/details/breathtaking-design-strategy-pep...

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.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_cube

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 =)

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.

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.

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.

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.

(but definitely don't think the license permits free use)

Might be placebo, but the text in the article jumped out at me as fresh, clean, and warm. I think they did good work

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.

https://www.oooninja.com/2008/02/metrical-equivalent-fonts-a...

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.

That is a beautiful phrase.