The Arialpocalypse: Default thinking ate the world.
August 29, 2025
We need to talk about Arial. Not because fonts matter in some precious design-nerd way, but because Arial is the perfect metaphor for how we ended up in this timeline: exhausted, homogenized, and giving up on even the smallest moments of agency. The Dodge Aries K Car of typography has led to the dystopian hell we’re wading in right now. See for yourself.
Greg Story is a designer of immense experience and influence. Here he has a detailed history of how Arial, the font, has taken over the modern design landscape.
Like Greg, I consider AriAl itself to be a poor knock-off of Helvetica. But his essay is not simply about taste and aesthetics, but about How its adoption is a metaphor for much else that has gone awry in our modern world.
