Good day, everyone. It is fall.

Earlier this month we had a little (font download) party where we go to see some of you, our neighbors from this little neighborhood. That was nice!

We’re thinking about neighborhoods and listening to Touché by John Roseboro. What have you been thinking about? What are you listening to?

Product News

Have you ever been in an Are.na rabbit hole, deep down some connection trail, and then tried to go back to a search or the explore page or whatever originally got you on the trail, only to find that it’s gone? Yes, us too. To help with this, we recently implemented the most luxurious possible version of “scroll restoration,” which is kind of what it sounds like: maintaining the scroll position across entries in your browser history. It’s truly a game changer for traversing connections. See here for a demo, or try it for yourself.

iOS-wise, we’ve implemented some nice quality of life improvements: You can now control the density of contents in search and explore. You can long-press on the add button to access a quick-add menu. And you can search through following and followers in profiles.

Areal is now available for free, for everyone

About a year ago, we updated our design with Areal, a custom-made typeface by Dinamo and a “revival” of our previous typeface, Arial. To date it stands as one of our favorite collaborations; we cherish the resulting typeface, and the response from others about the project was overwhelmingly positive. Last month, Dinamo made the typeface available to everyone—you can now download Areal for free.

To celebrate, we held a little download party at Index Space in Brooklyn. Dinamo also published a nice recap of their design process for Areal, which involved working with computer technology archivists to get access to some of the first personal computers and operating systems. And here’s our interview with Dinamo’s Johannes Breyer from last year, which also details how this collaboration came to be.

We’re excited to see what you do with the typeface! We made an open channel in case you want to keep us updated.

In June, we hosted an event with Triple Canopy called “From Earth to Sky,” which focused on the metaphors used to describe the internet that are drawn from the natural world. It featured talks on topics like the cloud, the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, and the internet’s back-to-the-land movement by Ingrid Burrington, Ruby Justice Thelot, Lai Yi Ohlsen, and Becca Abbe, and ended with a panel discussion led by Tiger Dingsun.

The event was so well attended that we ended up having to turn people away, so we decided to publish clips from the talks and a transcription of the discussion on Are.na Editorial. Read it here.

The clips are courtesy of New York Television, who livestreamed the event and have the full recording archived in their on-demand library. Big thank you to Tiger and Rachel Ossip from Triple Canopy for the collaboration.

Community News

Jon-Kyle Mohr has created Connections, a personals list for people on Are.na to meet through their profiles and channels. Connections lets you specify what kind of interactions you’re interested in—romance, friendship, collaboration, all of the above—as well as connect your Are.na collections and answer some prompts. You can then send someone a message and it opens a private Are.na channel just for the two of you. Jon-Kyle explains it well here, and you can try it out here.

Our first Channel Walkthrough with New York Television is now available through their on-demand library. We have a new set-up for these, with Scott Schwartz as host, two guests—this time, Shelby Shaw and Bri Griffin—and a brilliant game show-esque graphic treatment by Becca Abbe. More Channel Walkthroughs soon…but in the meantime, if you’re interested in the excellent programming New York Television (a rare independent content platform) has to offer, we highly recommend supporting them by buying a membership.

Are.na was at the New York Art Book Fair this year, and we’re also proud to have backed the Shannon Michael Cane Award. Thank you to Olivia McKayla Ross for running our booth and everyone who came by and signed our guest book.

On September 18, Connie, Renaise, and Justin hosted a walking Are.na meetup at the McCarren Track in Brooklyn. An Are.na meetup in motion. Looked really fun.

An interview with Are.na is featured in the book Unbound Conditions: Conversations on Publishing and the Web, edited by Minjae Ko and Seolyeon Park and published by Loose Leaf Publishing. We’re in great company with Mindy Seu, Tiger Dingsun, Valiz, Luna Maurer, Silvio Lorusso, HTTB.EU.

And finally, Ankita Shah wrote about how she uses Are.na to find books and writers on her Substack life, annotated.

Also, just a reminder that we source this section from our Community News channel, so if you have any news to share don’t hesitate to put it in there.

Roadmap

As always, you can check out our roadmap page, which goes into the features we're building, our long-term goals, and our current numbers.

There are so many places you can spend your attention, and we’re touched that you spent it reading this letter.

your success in mind,
The Are.na Team