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Airbnb's new typeface

airbnb.design

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Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#131

Post by briandear »

baal232 wrote: post #54
haberman wrote: post #41

Earlier 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…

Their core business is making two private parties feel good enough about each other in order to conducts a higher value transaction.

Friendliness, trust, professionalism are all part of the image AirBnB wants to convey to guests and hosts. I would say that a font is extremely a part of their core business as anything that even slightly improves the feeling of confidence you want your customers to have when they book a room — improves conversations, perceived satisfaction and a whole host of other intangible, but still very real aspects of the AirBnB experience.

Spend some time as an AirBnB host and you’ll quickly understand their core business is beyond just being a transaction engine but more around almost being a therapeutic interface between hosts and needy, insecure and hesitant guests. Remember also that AirBnB is growing rapidly — a large number of hosts and guest have never “done this sort of thing” before. So AirBnB’s design motifs have to be psychologically perfect to make those people, like your Aunt Edna, feel safe.

For the average HN reader, certainly Menlo, Times New Roman or Comic Sans would be suitable.

Design matters and it matters a hell of a lot when you are dealing with the “normal” public.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#132

Post by dx034 »

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…

Isn't that just a transactional database and support staff? Sounds to me like any simple bookkeeping software with a web front-end.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#133

Post by dx034 »

jensvdh wrote: post #100
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…

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.

Setting up payment interfaces in each currency takes a while but matching isn't hard. FX streams are easy to get, the algorithms to convert currencies so that you avoid exposure are not complicated.

It's probably mostly keeping all interfaces to payment vendors working.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#134

Post by dx034 »

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 don't like excessive complaining but isn't it valid to ask why a company such as airbnb needs to spend the money on their own font?

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#135

Post by wanda »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #97

God I wish we had “own typeface” money.

Just get Font-Forge[0] and a protractor. Give it a week or two and you'll be able to throw together some copycat LL Circular[1] derivative, to give the illusion of having 'own typeface' money, which might in turn look rather impressive to prospective investors.

(At least, when you say 'we', I presume you're speaking on behalf of a fledgling business. If you're just saying that you'd like more money for your family, well, I guess I'd still recommend making fonts because it's very lucrative work apparently.)

[0]: https://fontforge.github.io/en-US/

[1]: https://fontsinuse.com/uses/7192/airbnb-identity-website-app...

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#136

Post by enra »

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?

I wasn't part of the Netflix Sans or have insight into the process or have access to their fonts, so cannot really speak to the differences per say.

I can say that modern(since 15th century) latin based type, is usually based one of the traditional type families: Humanist (Venetian pen-writing, eg. Palantino), Grotesques (sans-serifs) and Neo-grotesques (more geometric grotesques like Helvetica). In terms of creating a usable typeface, you pretty much follow one or two of those traditional families, and then adjust terminals, proportions and other features. If you go too crazy, it might just look strange and not work well anymore. You can create something very distinct for a very special purpose, say a movie title score for a scifi movie, but for an UI, you want something that doesn't distract the user. Its like most visual design, you want it be pleasant, but user should eventually forget the design and focus on the task at hand.

We started this project a while back (18mo ago which is timeline not an active development time), and received and tested probably around 30 different font file iterations during that process. These included several directions of the font families based on our initial ideation workshop. Even when you're in the process, it can be pretty hard to see the differences, just looking some of the letters, unless you really focus and try to tease out the differences. Something like 'o' is pretty much the same in all same family typefaces, and most letters have very similar shape. In our case, we did a lot of testing around actually designing existing or new UIs and where is becomes much more apparent how all the letters and proportions work together. (If anyone wants to test it, then pick 5 or so very similar looking fonts like Roboto, SF, Helvetica, and design few screens with it with varying sizes, amount of content and weights, compare and see how the differences feel.)

Our goal since the beginning was to find something that works well in UI, and is expressive for marketing. Some weights like Book, Medium and Bold are meant for UI where as ExtraBold and Black are more towards marketing. We find that where we are now is definitely an improvement for what we had before. Both our brand and design is quite minimal and heavily relies on type, we think that it's important to control it and make sure it feels like us.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#137

Post by KineticLensman »

rotub wrote: post #115
woah wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, as in their purple chair [0]

[0] https://news.starbucks.com/news/how-a-purple-chair-changed-t...

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#138

Post by briandear »

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…

Have you every written a scheduling app or a booking engine? At their scale, it’s hardly not interesting. Just that aspect alone is crazy hard to get right. On top of that they essentially have a CMS for hosts and very complex payment system. Security alone requires a pretty massive team.

Each component of their system could be a separate company. I own a small B&B in a tiny corner of Provence and I get dozens of inquiries a week — all of those inquires are spending time looking at images, checking availability, etc. now multiple that across almost the world and you will find some extremely interesting engineering challenges.

And site reliability has been exceptional. I’ve also never encountered a single bug in my normal use. That’s a big deal.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#139

Post by amelius »

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 have no clue what most engineers would be doing there day to day.

Keeping up with the ever changing requirements of service design, marketing and sales, I suppose.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#140

Post by krn »

nemothekid wrote: post #104
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.

No, there is a difference what a VC-funded startup should be burning money on. It's not a public company, yet.
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