Areal, Are.na's new typeface

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

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.

[dead]

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

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.

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!

Release notes are good.

>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.

Fonts are extremely hard to make

"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.

> 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

font licensing is expensive

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.

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.

Tbh it kinda feels like that legendary Pepsi BREATHTAKING Design Strategy from 2008

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

Or Liberation Sans

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

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