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.
The point is to get slightly changed Arial. Arial is great typeface. The freedom to tweak it and not be burdened by licensing issues makes the project worth it.
> 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’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.
There is no copyright protection of visual shapes/curves. Typefaces are licensed as software, the source code (coordinates/bezier curves) are what is protected by copyright.
If you make a typeface by overdrawing different typeface it's completely ok. Even calling it Areal.
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.
So he is apparently aware of the fart-sniffing cringe of certain design choices and yet... he does it anyway.
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.
I've considered using one of Dinamo's fonts, Diatype, but I can't bring myself to license each font weight for €140, double that if you want italics. Wait are you building a web app, distinct from website, using desktop tools like Figma? Triple it. (Just one domain, right?) Your company employs 50 people? Double it again. We're up over €13,000 for one typeface but it's yours, with a generous bundle discount, for just €4,662. Now can they interest you in Mono, Semi-Mono, Compressed, Mono Compressed, Semi-Mono Compressed, Condensed, Mono Condensed, Semi-Mono Condensed, Extended, Expanded, Rounded, Rounded Mono, Rounded Semi-Mono...
font licensing is a mess and it makes it impossible for small businesses/individuals to use it. It's a shame because it makes it an exclusive for big clients and the consultants they employ.
It depends on type foundries. Some of even the high quality ones (Grilli Type, Florian Karsten) keep the licensing fees pretty fair one time perpetual licenses.
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.
I mean, sure, but this is the smallest conceivable quantum of economic inequality given the variety and quality of free typefaces available to everybody. It's hard to think of something less foundational to opportunity than the specific shape of your descenders and counters.
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...
Yea, if you are going to spend so much money why make a carbon copy of font that is a bad copy of another font? Why not just make a copy of Helvetica instead of it's knock off or I would have made a new font in the style of the former instead of an almost pixel perfect copy.
Calling Arial just a bad Helvetica copy misses the point. Arial stands on its own as a typeface and has its own feel and nice qualities. It was made by really great type designers who were tasked to create contemporary neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface for digital screens. The constrains of digital resolutions of the time dictate some important details. It might be nostalgia or something subconscious but for many people Arial is the bland "non" typeface that they don't notice. If you want to achieve this effect Arial is the main choice. There is another similar high quality type family called Untitled and article explaining the thinking https://klim.co.nz/blog/untitled-sans-serif-design-informati...
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.
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
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.
"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
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).
Readit News
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.
> 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.
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.
If you make a typeface by overdrawing different typeface it's completely ok. Even calling it Areal.
From TFA:
So he is apparently aware of the fart-sniffing cringe of certain design choices and yet... he does it anyway.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...
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
https://media1.tenor.com/m/RFe1swp-ZwkAAAAd/diablo-joke.gif
Arial, really? Arial?
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).
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