Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Airbnb's new typeface

airbnb.design

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 176 posts

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#111

Post by Retra »

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.

Let's discuss the font then. It's boring and generic. Obviously it needs a 30-page puff piece written about it. Remind everybody the AirBnb had a super bowl ad, etc. This is not content marketing. Yada yada.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#112

Post by econ_th0 »

brailsafe wrote: post #38
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…

Congrats to your team on creating what looks like a very versatile font. I can appreciate the benefits that creating a custom font will have. One of the other commenters mentioned that AirBnB's Cereal and Netflix Sans (both overseen by Dalton Maag) are almost identical. Could you speak to the differences, technical or otherwise between the results and how that relates to differentiating the brand aesthetic?

op delivers a usual...

the fact is 99.999999% of people do not see or notice the difference.

i can say with strong belief that changing your font did not add to your bottom line.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#113

Post by rootlocus »

syassami wrote: post #109
adventured wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

First of all, nobody mentioned building anything in a weekend. Second, generic responses like yours can also be considered "classic HN", so it's kind of like the pot calling the kettle black.

And third, If you've made the same font for Netflix, it apparently takes 3 months to make enough subtle changes to brand it "one of a kind".

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#115

Post by rotub »

woah wrote: post #90
dawhizkid wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Brand is all they have, since the app is so simple. Saying that a typeface in an app is wasteful is like saying it’s wasteful for Starbucks to commission their own chairs.

...and does Starbucks commission their own chairs? Serious question

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#116

Post by jadedhacker »

mozumder wrote: post #107
phkahler wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 compani…

If your major differentiating factor is mainly branding, you are already a commodity. Customers will often use shitty looking products if there's something in it for them.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#117

Post by dawhizkid »

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.

I'm making a point on how indulgent it is to spend technical resources on something of so little consequence, and then write 2(!) 10,000+ word blogposts (including https://airbnb.design/working-type/) on it and also produce a video to announce it to the world.

The second blogpost actually says After 18 months of creating, refining, testing, and integrating, we flipped the switch and released Airbnb Cereal across our brand and product. 18 months?! This is HBO Silicon Valley level insanity.

Spend 18 months figuring out how to stop real issues on the marketplace like discrimination against minority guests. The only solution Airbnb has offered to quell the #AirbnbWhileBlack controversies that started in 2016 has been to force hosts and guests to click a button pledging to not discriminate. That is an actual issue. This is throwing idle bodies at a non-existent problem.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#118

Post by ggg9990 »

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…

It’s easy to say you’re overinvested in design, but many massively successful companies are separated from their also-ran competitors by seemingly minor design decisions, like 140 character limits or disappearing messages. In this context, design seems worth the money.
Post reply on HN