i find it fascinating how bizarrely hostile to a company developing a new font some people are. it's just branding and identity, like logos, color schemes and design languages. not really a big deal. but holy smokes do people talk a lot of shit about fonts... for whatever reason. what's going on? is it really about the company, and not the font?
Airbnb's new typeface
91–100 of 176 posts
Re: Airbnb's new typeface
#92I‘m not at all a font expert or even geek, so forgive me if that’s dumb: Do all those new product fonts look like Circular [1]? It’s always struck me as a very unique font, but it’s becoming less unique every day it seems. 1: https://lineto.com/The+Fonts/Font+Categories/Text+Fonts/Circ...
That's a curious charge, since Circular was Airbnb's CI font until today.
Re: Airbnb's new typeface
#93All I can gather from this is Airbnb has way too many engineers and designers for the amount of actual work there is to go around. At the end of the day, the day to day engineering problems Airbnb has are not very interesting. It’s a web app that can handle peak traffic with standard technologies (meaning nothing real time, live streaming, or millions of users at once). I have no clue what most engineers would be doi…
> too many engineers and designers for the amount of actual work there is to go around
Paging the gang over at Twitter.
Re: Airbnb's new typeface
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you presume to say what AirBnB "should not" do? You get to run your business according to your priorities, as does AirBnB's CEO. > Plenty of successful companies managed to create a distinct brand identity using helvetica. You could use this logic to criticize basically any company expenditure as frivolous. Plenty of companies do things that probably aren't strictly necessary for their survival. I for one am g…
> Why do you presume to say what AirBnB "should not" do? You get to run your business according to your priorities, as does AirBnB's CEO. If we followed your reasoning, most CEOs would be immune from criticism. I, on the other hand, have a different rule of thumb. If a company does something in public, it's fair game for the public to talk about it. >You could use this logic to criticize basically any company expendi…
Anything a company does, in private or in public, is legitimately subject to criticism.
Re: Airbnb's new typeface
#95Please do a major rehaul of your crappy user interface instead of that stuff
Re: Airbnb's new typeface
#96Does anyone else with astigmatism notice that the e, c, and even the a are way too closed off? Especially for print (and on the heavier weights), good luck distinguishing these characters from far away with an o.
Is your astigmatism uncorrected? I can make the characters out just fine, but I wear contacts for astigmatism.
Re: Airbnb's new typeface
#97God I wish we had “own typeface” money.
Re: Airbnb's new typeface
#98Why 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.
> Why are all these companies designing their own fonts.
Too much money, too much time on their hands, too much ego-driven decision-making.
Re: Airbnb's new typeface
#99All I can gather from this is Airbnb has way too many engineers and designers for the amount of actual work there is to go around. At the end of the day, the day to day engineering problems Airbnb has are not very interesting. It’s a web app that can handle peak traffic with standard technologies (meaning nothing real time, live streaming, or millions of users at once). I have no clue what most engineers would be doi…
HN at its worst: using a post about creating a font as a cheap excuse to mock Airbnb's engineers and designers, their jobs and their reason for being employed there.
And somehow it's the top comment in the thread, as opposed to, say, actually discussing the font or the content of the article. Wtf.
Re: Airbnb's new typeface
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an example of what some of the engineering people do, that wouldn't be an immediately obvious need if you haven't been involved in running global businesses at scale: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/tracking-the-money-sca... A tiny part of what they need all these resources for. Obviously running any sufficiently large business on a global basis is a tad more complicated than simply keeping a website up that…
I worked on payments at Uber for 2 years, so I know there is unavoidable complexity in operating at a global scale. I would argue payments is harder at Uber especially on the remittance side compared to Airbnb but obviously I’m biased. I would agree that money engineering is probably the hardest problem they have. But unlike Uber they don’t have any realtime/streaming/GPS-dependent tech. So outside of payments it’s n…
Airbnb handles hosts and guests paying each other in different currencies. They're also active in 190+ countries. I would say their payments system is more complex than most companies.