Introducing Areal, Are.na’s New Typeface

Over the past year, we’ve been working with the design studio Dinamo on a custom typeface for Are.na. Starting today, the typeface you’ll see on Are.na (and that you’re reading right now on Are.na Editorial) is Areal, a “revival” of Arial, entirely redrawn and rebuilt from the ground up. 

We’re excited about Areal because Dinamo’s revival is designed to be especially suited for Are.na. But a good deal of our excitement also has to do with the process and the thinking behind the project, which we get into in the interview below. We’ve long admired Johannes and the team at Dinamo — they have a lot of fun with what they do, and they also do it extremely well. There was truly no better partner for this project.

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Meg Miller: I think the first I heard of this was Cab putting a screenshot of a text exchange between the two of you in our Discord and saying Dinamo wants to do an Arial Are.na font. Everyone was really excited. This was back in July 2024, but it seemed like you had maybe talked about it in person before that? 

Charles Broskoski: Yeah, Johannes and I met in 2019 at a conference called Post Design Festival. We chatted every once and a while, but the next time we saw each other was probably five years later when Johannes came to New York. We had the idea that we wanted Are.na and Dinamo to do something together, but it wasn't quite clear what it should be. Like with a lot of these collaborations that we do, and probably Johannes too, they start because we recognize a kindred spirit in the way the other person works, and the project just sort of develops from there. 

I do remember being at dinner and talking about the process that we went through for making Sander [Are.na’s web client, launched in 2024] — how we completely rewrote the front-end of Are.na, but the design stayed the same. And part of the design staying the same was our decision to continue using Arial. I can’t say that everyone at Are.na loves Arial, but I definitely love Arial, and it’s so much a part of the look of Are.na.

Johannes Breyer: Arial is kind of a Frankenstein typeface — on one hand its origins involve these huge technology companies that were buying each other up, and so Arial changed hands a couple of times. It is basically a copy of Helvetica. It’s a system font, so at another stage it also became a kind of non-choice for a certain type of graphic designer who didn't want to make a point of choosing a cool or new font. But of course, choosing to go with the default is also a choice. It's a super convoluted and interesting space. 

I remember when we met you told me about this performance art piece by Kristin Lucas called Refresh, where she legally changes her name to the same name. This piece talks about bureaucracy and corporations, but also actualizing and refreshing yourself. With programming it can be the same — a lot of time when you’re rewriting code, you’re rewriting it to be better and more beautiful, but it’s not so visible, so it’s possible people won’t even notice. So the question became, “If we want to make a font for Arena, but they already have the perfect font, how can we update Are.na's identity with a meaningful gesture?”

Meg: Can I ask you to go more into this question of why Arial?¹ Cab, why was Arial originally chosen as the typeface for Are.na? And Johannes, why was it interesting for Dinamo to remake this typeface? 

Cab: For us there's a few parts to it. 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. 

The second part is that when we simplified the Are.na interface in 2014 to the structure that it currently uses [with the breadcrumb navigation], we adopted Arial across the board. When we made this interface change, our desire was to be as default as we could so that Are.na wouldn’t get in the way of the content. In other words, we wanted Are.na to look good, but to fade into the background as much as possible.

This is a very long-winded way of saying that the reason we wanted to use Arial is because it doesn’t have much of a “look” at all. Of course, like we’ve been talking about, it does have this history and it’s used as a default and there are all of these connotations that get imbued into it. But I still think it’s about the closest you can get to that. Do you agree with that, Johannes?

Johannes: Yeah, one hundred percent. Arial is an interesting piece of font technology history because it’s regarded as a sloppily drawn font that's kind of incomplete, abandoned by its parents but universally present. So basically, as a type designer, it’s something that you would absolutely not like to spend time with or redraw [laughs]. But funnily enough, after you do it for a while, you suddenly find these inconsistencies very charming and interesting. Now that type software has advanced so much, and we can draw perfect curves and streamline so many steps, some of these elements of Arial feel like a human touch among today’s digitally-produced fonts. It becomes interesting and important again. 

Along with design historian Ferdinand Ulrich, we did a lot of research into the history of Arial and the different versions of it, and what really clicked for me was when we were able to track down the first version of Arial that was used on the internet. Arial existed before the internet opened its gates, so to speak. But that first internet-version of Arial became our starting point. 

Meg: We’ve been touching a bit on the history of Arial, but the short version of the origin story is that Arial was designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders² at the type foundry Monotype. IBM had commissioned Monotype to develop Arial for a laser printer because they didn’t have access to Helvetica, which was developed by Monotype’s competitor Linotype, and was being used by IBM competitor Xerox for its own laser printer. 

But the history of Arial keeps going beyond just that origin story, and Dinamo did some great research around the different versions of Arial from 1982 to 2017. The 1992 version was included on the Windows 3.1 operating system, which put Arial on all of these personal computers for the first time. In 1996, Arial 2.82 was selected by Microsoft to be one of the “core fonts for the web,” and when the internet became more broadly used in the years that followed, this was the version of Arial people were seeing. That was also the version that you used as a basis for the re-digitalization.

Johannes: Exactly, that's where we found a kind of conceptual overlap with Are.na as an internet platform. And the version of Arial that we used as a sample for the revival was the first internet version of the font, in a sense. 

One thing that we found out as a result of our research is that the version of Arial that we use today is basically the one from the 2000s, which is kind of insane. There are newer versions, like Arial Nova from 2017 that come with newer Windows operating systems. There’s also Arial Unicode, and other projects like that, but the font that we are usually looking at is the OG version with only subtle updates. My assumption is that’s because Microsoft is such a superpower, and Arial spread so quickly and so widely, that updating Arial became very difficult because so many widely-distributed documents would break, or at least dramatically reflow once the font gets updated.

So we built a script to compare the different versions of Arial, and we realized there was very little change even in the updated versions. The curves are the same – like, one-to-one the same. Before, we thought that we could make our version about the differences between versions — maybe we would find a weird one-pixel distortion or something like that. But there were really no discernable differences. 

But in a way it also fit with this idea in the Kristin Lucas Refresh piece and the redevelopment of Are.na’s front-end — we wanted to make the same thing again as a way to self-actualize and also find some beauty in the process itself. Even if nobody ever notices what we did. 

Meg: And because you were working with a digital font, the process for redrawing it was based on screenshots. What was that process like?

Johannes: A huge thing in the type design world is working on revivals, where type designers will interpret or digitize a historical typeface design. Usually these start with a sample — a high res scan of a book cover with some letters on it, for example. You have a historic reference in front of you that you then interpret through technology, your own taste, and whatnot. Fabian [Harb, Dinamo co-founder] and myself have been doing typeface revivals like that for almost 20 years. But since Arial was a digital font already, there are no pre-computer, analog artifacts. It was born in the computer age and has always remained in it. So naturally, we — me, Hugo [Jourdan, Dinamo font engineer], and Fabiola [Mejía, Dinamo type designer] — felt that the perfect source for tracing a digital-first typeface would be digital screenshots, starting from its natural habitat.

It turned out that collecting all the versions of Arial was quite difficult nowadays, which I think adds a layer of preservation to what we're doing. It's very hard to find a first or second or third version of Arial because where do you get it from? We had to talk to computer technology archivists who have these old machines with the old systems, so we could pull certain versions onto a floppy disc and transfer it. So it was really complicated to even find and retrieve these older versions of Arial, which makes you realize that with digital artifacts, even though everything is so much more available and you have all these duplicates flying around, things get easily lost and can’t be found again. When software and hardware develops, things become incompatible quickly. It's much more fragile than we think.

It took us months to get the versions of Arial that we wanted. Then Hugo found a tool that let us boot a specific version and year of Microsoft. We could basically start our computer in Windows 2000 and then could go into the system preferences and load the font. We would show it big, just the letters, and then screenshot as many letters as possible in different sizes, so we could inspect the rendering of the curves as closely as possible. And that became the blueprint that Fabiola and I used for digitally tracing the characters. 

The original Arial is all fucked up, which is crazy when you think about how widely it's distributed. The curve quality feels inconsistent and the shapes seem to have a life of their own. But also it doesn't really matter, I really think it’s a great piece of design. I keep saying this was kind of a therapy project because, as type designers, we have so many scripts and tools and developers running quality assurance processes over everything that we make. We spend so much time making sure there is consistency. But then here we are looking at the most popular font in the world and it’s all crooked. And it's also fine [laughs]. It's totally working. It looks great.

Meg: So now when people go onto Are.na they are looking at Areal, which is not to be confused with Arial. What’s the chance that someone will recognize that Are.na has switched from Arial to Areal without reading this interview?

Johannes: The hope is that you can’t really spot a difference. Looking at Arial and Areal should feel like refreshing a browser page. It’s the same, but it isn’t. 

But if you overlay the outlines of Areal and Arial, they are different outlines. We streamlined the stem thicknesses. We added characters that could be useful eventually. We did some nice ligatures that it didn't have before. You guys provided a testing environment for Are.na and we loaded the font and were able to test different weights using a variable font, which isn’t possible with the classic, static Arial. We were able to fill in some characters that were missing and of course add the Are.na stars.

We also drew a monospaced version, as well as a Dinamo-style “semi-mono” (half mono, half proportional). We were able to play with it and extend it and really think about what a website needs from this font in the year 2025. How do the buttons work? What labels is Are.na using? It's nice because the project has this kind of Dada, silly element to it, but we’re also producing something better. This version works better for Are.na.

Cab: I'm just laughing hearing you describe that because it’s exactly how I felt when we made Sander. We worked on rewriting the front-end of Are.na for a year and a half. It’s so much better than before, but when it was done, it was like “how do I describe what the differences are to people?” At the same time it's completely new and exactly the same.

Johannes: Yeah I think it is quite similar, and there's probably no other client who would let us do this. Or nobody else who would have these conversations with us and take this fun and lighthearted project so seriously. The whole project has an almost artistic spirit, in a sense, which I find really beautiful. 

On the other hand, I think we produced a really good font. And I think you produced a really good interface. We are seeking beauty, but also, these things should work. For example, we did dark mode optimization, so when you switch your computer to dark mode, the font performs a bit better because it shines a bit brighter against a dark background. We did this by planting a variable dark mode axis into the typeface so that it recognizes what mode it’s being used on, and then adjusts the weight a little bit. So that part is kind of pro-level. 

Meg: The whole thing is pro-level. 

Cab: It’s pro-level in a way that's not in your face. The luxury aspect of it is not apparent on the surface. The value is more in the process — it’s about doing this thing that you love and doing it right this time. It’s a way to honor it.

Johannes: Another way we’ve been thinking about it is that, in the same way as we were able to trace Arial back to the first internet version, with Areal we’ve now produced another snapshot of the font in 2025. Whenever you make a font, it's also a snapshot of the technology at the time, the environment you work in, your design principles and working conditions. Maybe this is just another snapshot in a much longer timeline.

Find more about Areal and play around with it on https://are.al.are.na/.