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Airbnb's new typeface

airbnb.design

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Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#101

Post by reilly3000 »

dawhizkid wrote: post #80

All 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…

I don’t know, having spent a significant amount of time with Airflow and Superset, their analytics stack must take an army of engineers, product people, and analysts to use. They have to troubleshoot issues with visits in real time. They have to not double book properties and keep an audit log of every crazy thing hosts do, and detect all kinds of fraud, all while supporting global localization. The have municipal level compliance to manage, and I’m sure a huge back office to help their various legal efforts.

I’m convinced that any business that operates at global scale needs an army of engineers doing, training to do, and coordinating across hundreds of technical areas.

Or is hiring engineers somehow so glamourous that doing so outweighs the profit motive?

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#103

Post by notatoad »

rhizome wrote: post #56
jrs95 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely not cheaper than using free fonts. Or even modifying an existing one -- it's not as if Airbnb's exclusive use of this font is going to benefit them in any measurable way. Even if that were necessary, it seems like they should have just paid Netflix to use their font, and maybe make some changes, rather than working with Dalton Maag to make damn near the same thing.

I mean, what's the most expensive commercial font license? Neue Helvetica is $350/yr/cpu.

Does a per-cpu licence allow you to use the font in all your publications?

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#104

Post by nemothekid »

dawhizkid wrote: post #80

All 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…

I don't get this post? Does this mean only Apple & Google are allowed to create fonts? Are companies no longer allowed explore pursuits outside their immediate business model?

I can only imagine posters like you, on Usenet back in the days complaining that Apple has "too many engineers & designers" when they had Susan Kare design their icons.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#105

Post by kccqzy »

> Our Latin character set has a few hundred characters but Chinese Simplified, for example, has over 27,000. We intend to expand to include script systems used by our global community including Chinese, Japanese, Devanagari, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Greek, and Thai, and that will take time.

Good luck with that. I wonder how long that will take.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#106

Post by mozumder »

enra wrote: post #20

One of the people involved in the project and answering questions in the article. Happy to answer more questions. 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 u…

Did you look at making it a variable font to reduce bandwidth on web loads?

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#107

Post by mozumder »

phkahler wrote: post #81
huac wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating a typeface which you own is cheaper than licensing a third-party typeface, at scale.

>> Creating a typeface which you own is cheaper than licensing a third-party typeface, at scale. The cheapest fonts are the ones installed on a users system. Web sites and apps do not need to include fonts at all. In fact it's easy to argue that the users should be selecting the fonts on their devices in most cases.

Never let the user control your brand. System fonts should always be thrown away.

Every company web site & app needs to include their own font. Otherwise, you become a commodity, and you can be replaced by your competitors.

Business is about being different from competitors, not the same. And people buy things that look good.

Companies that have crappy branding lose money, because they lose customers to other companies.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#108

Post by dawhizkid »

reilly3000 wrote: post #101
dawhizkid wrote: post #80

All 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…

I don’t know, having spent a significant amount of time with Airflow and Superset, their analytics stack must take an army of engineers, product people, and analysts to use. They have to troubleshoot issues with visits in real time. They have to not double book properties and keep an audit log of every crazy thing hosts do, and detect all kinds of fraud, all while supporting global localization. The have municipal le…

Sorry but are you really citing the problem of “not double booking” properties as one of the reasons Airbnb needs to hire an army of web developers?

“How many developers does it take to design a reservations schema?”

I would put open source projects like the ones you’ve mentioned as more evidence Airbnb has too many idle engineers. I think even Google uses Tableau for their BI analytics stack. There’s not necessarily any business justification for a private startup to have to build that from scratch, and the only way Airbnb could justify working on projects like that is if they had a ton of engineering capacity not already working on the core marketplace product.

Most if not all of the challenges you listed are non-engineering related (legal, compliance, host operations, localization)

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#109

Post by syassami »

adventured wrote: post #99
dawhizkid wrote: post #80

All 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.

it's a classic HN. "I can build that in a weekend!"

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#110

Post by rootlocus »

atanasb wrote: post #14
deft wrote: post #8

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.

My personal take on this: 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 aestheti…

> Q: Why are all these companies designing their own fonts. It's not needed...

It's marketing.

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