Airbnb's new typeface • Hacker News Board

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#121

Post by ggg9990 » Wed, May 16, 2018, 6:56 AM UTC

baal232 wrote: post #23

I liken this to a hotel that decides to make their own lightbulbs. Or a department store that produces it's own bespoke cash registers. You can't argue that typography is so vital to their business that this is a useful allocation of resources. Obviously, design is important to any company that markets itself in some way. But not every company designs their own typeface (although it seems like it, lately.) Some are s…

What about a hotel making its own mattress? Westin did this with massive commercial success.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#122

Post by ggg9990 » Wed, May 16, 2018, 6:59 AM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #66

Alex3917 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I liken this to a hotel that decides to make their own lightbulbs. The key differentiator between AirBnB and a hotel is the community. By adopting a more flippant variation of the well-known humanist sans-serif fonts, they're communicating that their experience is more about the people and the connections than just the physical infrastructure of a boring old Helvetica hotel. Having their own typeface is good strate…

> Now every time you drive past a Wal-Mart, the font tells that story before you even walk into the store. If so for me, then it must be subliminal, as I had not even noticed the typeface. If the message is 'bland' and 'unexceptional', then at least I have not been subliminally misled.

Bland and unexceptional is the brand. Walmart isn’t trying to be fun or cool, they’re trying to signal “cheap stuff inside.” If bland and unexciting came to your mind, it’s working.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#123

Post by ggg9990 » Wed, May 16, 2018, 7:01 AM UTC

jadedhacker wrote: post #116

mozumder wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not for a network effect business. A network effect business doesn’t need a strong advantage or even any advantage if the network is strong enough. Note that eBay has barely changed in 20 years yet is still the only place to go to get Hamburglar sunglasses or whatever.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#124

Post by ggg9990 » Wed, May 16, 2018, 7:04 AM UTC

A lot of masturbation in the blog text but this is primarily a cost play. At huge scale, licensing a font is a big recurring expense. And using system fonts is costly in a different way when you find that your slick new UI tiles wrap incorrectly with the system font on Windows Phone 8.34. So creating a single cross platform font is the best way to go.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#125

Post by ggg9990 » Wed, May 16, 2018, 7:09 AM UTC

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…

My guess is that their biggest technical challenge is fraud detection. High dollar two sided marketplace is ripe for it.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#126

Post by saagarjha » Wed, May 16, 2018, 7:13 AM UTC

econ_th0 wrote: post #112

brailsafe wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fonts are a very subliminal thing. Sure, you may not be able to point out the differences between certain fonts, but many can tell the difference between different corporate identities.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#127

Post by saagarjha » Wed, May 16, 2018, 7:15 AM UTC

whitepoplar wrote: post #72

woolvalley wrote: post #71

Is it just me, or is the design motif that airbnb is adopting in this post fairly similar to dropbox's? I'm also reminded of it in the new gmail interface.

and iOS 11

How so?

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#128

Post by brailsafe » Wed, May 16, 2018, 7:18 AM UTC

6cd6beb wrote: post #69

brailsafe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between a fontset that looks similar and a fontset that solves for all the business requirements can be vast. Cereal appears to be extremely versatile and distinct in a few key areas. You don't need a custom font to distinguish your brand from others, but you probably do if you're going to be using that one typeface for every damn thing in every damn scenario.

I think the fact that this new font has an installed base of 0 counts against it's versatility. I think the fact that a negligible amount of the general public could pick the new font (knowingly, not by guessing) out of a group of 9 other sans fonts counts against it's ability to distinguish the airbnb brand from others.

I don't think more than 1 in 9 people chosen randomly out of the general public would be able to accurately name any font and don't think this has any bearing on distinction. I did ask a followup question regarding the similarity to Netflix Sans however. Secondly, I don't understand your first statement.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#129

Post by mephitix » Wed, May 16, 2018, 7:18 AM UTC

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!"

Actually my response was - WHY build/work on this? I understand that licensing a font can cost a company a lot of money but there is no reason why a company of this size can't just use any of the thousands of open source fonts available. It is a waste of time/resources that is pretty characteristic of a big tech company (having worked at one).

In at least the cases I've seen - the reason why this happens is because design teams want to stand out and stamp their identity on the company. It is a reason to add imaginary value to internal "design studios" and promote designers to arbitrary titles.

And engineers, PMs, etc. mostly do the same. Create work, features, platforms that add no real value but simply to stamp their identity and pursue (effectively) self-promotion.

The original commenter makes a great point about saying that there are many other things to focus their energies. Okay, throwing engineers at a single problem is not a good way to do things.

But the AirBnB iOS app has been broken for ages. Various visual and functional bugs. Offline support is arguably the most important feature for an AirBnb app (if you're traveling and don't have service). But this hasn't been tackled at all.

Instead AirBnB engineers are going through all of their properties and updating their fonts, fixing issues with responsiveness/scaling, packaging on mobile platforms, etc. WHY?

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#130

Post by coldtea » Wed, May 16, 2018, 7:22 AM UTC

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.

>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.

Specifics of your comment aside (which I may agree with), on principle it's not necessary to always discuss the "content of the article".

The post serves as a starting point. It doesn't have to confine and frame the discussion. Especially if there are other more important stuff lurking or implied behind what a post says.