Introducing Areal, Are.na’s New Typeface
August 21, 2025 — by Johannes Breyer, Charles Broskoski, and Meg Miller
Areal, a new typeface custom-made by Dinamo for Are.na. [A text doc from an old Windows operating system. Inside the doc, either Areal or Arial is written in the new typeface, the space where the 'e' or 'i' would go is blank.]
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.
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