11–20 of 176 posts
I find it profoundly stupid for Airbnb to have their own typeface. It's like they have lots of designers around and have to keep them busy with something. Well at least they did not give them the usual entertainment for bored designers: redesigning stuff that does not need a redesign.
I find it profoundly stupid for Airbnb to have their own typeface. It's like they have lots of designers around and have to keep them busy with something. Well at least they did not give them the usual entertainment for bored designers: redesigning stuff that does not need a redesign.
Creating a typeface which you own is cheaper than licensing a third-party typeface, at scale.
Why do they use a screenshot with a typo for demonstration purposes? Beautiful is misspelled as "beutiful". Why are all these companies designing their own fonts. It's not needed and for primarily mobile-based apps it ends up being jarring.
Q: why do they use a screenshot with a typo.
A: Maybe to bring attention to the font? To the letters that are missing or those that are present? Maybe just because they can.
Q: Why are all these companies designing their own fonts. It's not needed...
A: Many reasons. It can be cheaper than licensing other fonts. It makes their apps (and brand) stand out. Or people might find it more aesthetically pleasing. The perceived `need` for it, has nothing to do with whether or not you need it for their app/website to function properly. And maybe `jarring` is exactly what they want.
I find it profoundly stupid for Airbnb to have their own typeface. It's like they have lots of designers around and have to keep them busy with something. Well at least they did not give them the usual entertainment for bored designers: redesigning stuff that does not need a redesign.
It probably took a week just to put together this post. I bet it's great for recruiting though. Kind of like google letting researchers waste half their time writing papers and going to conferences.
I find it profoundly stupid for Airbnb to have their own typeface. It's like they have lots of designers around and have to keep them busy with something. Well at least they did not give them the usual entertainment for bored designers: redesigning stuff that does not need a redesign.
We talk about reasoning for Cereal in the article and in my case study too[1]. In large organizations, you often have tens or hundreds of designers, support multiple platforms (ios, android, web(mac, windows, linux) and do ad campaigns around the world. When it comes to typefaces, there really isn't any universal system fonts (other than Arial maybe), that are available on all platforms. If you use different fonts on each platform, the design will be slightly different, trying to manage a cross-platform design system (like we do [2]) becomes challenging. Every time, designer has to pick the right font, potentially do 2-3 designs with different font to make sure they all look how they want them to. Also then each time user or anyone in the company looks at the design on their device, it look will slightly different. If the marketing then also uses different type, it will look slightly off if you include product shots (one reason why Apple now uses SF everywhere). Short answer: having multiple fonts causes additional work and can confuse people, especially inside the company.
Since there isn't universal cross-platform fonts, it means you often have to embed fonts, and in some cases license them. Licensing fonts is different than just buying a font file. Even for small developers quality fonts can run up to $50,000 per app (imagine what the licensing costs are for a global company with large userbase!). With licensing you never get exactly what you want in terms of expression and functionality, and other brands can easily buy the same thing.
As the last point, what I find really exciting that we can now consider font kind of like a software. We change it whenever we find problems or just want to improve something. That is usually not possible with licensing. Obviously, you would and should only do your own typeface if you have these kind of issues and care enough wanting to solve them.