Jonas Arleth

Fonts in use: Pangea and Pangea Text

A strong profile on the web

Ten years ago, the Hamburg web designer Jonas Arleth started his career as an independent developer and trainer. For the past five years, he has published weekly podcast episodes, video tutorials or blog posts in which he talks about digital design topics, freelancing and working with clients. More than one million people a year attend Arleth’s courses and projects.

In the 139th episode (June 2021) of his Web & Design Podcast he devoted himself to the topic of web typography. His guest was Oliver Schöndorfer (Pimp my Type), who has been fighting passionately for better typography on the internet since 2018. For him, a first step in this direction is the farewell to free everyday fonts and the move to a professional retail typeface. Here they both agree immediately, because Jonas had already switched his website to Pangea before the interview was recorded.

The central message of the 90-minute episode is crystal clear:

Investing in an independent typeface pays off. It is the clothing of your language. If you take a free Roboto, Segoe or Open Sans you say: I am the same as the others. If that’s the case, OK.

Jonas Arleth

However, if you offer an individual service or a self-developed product, you should not sell your identity on the visual level: “Then you are just a cogwheel of Android or Windows, or a copy of one of 10 Millions of Open Sans users.”

According to Schöndorfer, it’s a missed opportunity if you do not use your own color with a font that has a unique selling point to create your own visual identity. It is precisely this last building block in the development of one’s own business model that must not be overlooked. Jonas Arleth has internalized this claim. He uses Pangea in combination with her sister Pangea Text in the posts and profile pictures of all his channels, and there are many: Instagram, Dribble, YouTube, Soundcloud, Pinterest, Webflow and Patreon. It’s not surprising that Arleth is one of the most popular web design voices in the country.

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