Comment by petralithic

from https://are.al.are.na/

> 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.

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.

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

So you say they gave the rights of that new typeface to... Microsoft?

I saw it and its meaningful like a details in a good code

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.

So he is apparently aware of the fart-sniffing cringe of certain design choices and yet... he does it anyway.