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Airbnb's new typeface

airbnb.design

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Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#141

Post by gingericha »

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.

Doesn't that ignore OP's additional point:

>If you use different fonts on each platform, the design will be slightly different, trying to manage a cross-platform design system ... becomes challenging. Every time, designer has to pick the right font, potentially do 2-3 designs with different font to make sure they all look how they want them to. Also then each time user or anyone in the company looks at the design on their device, it look will slightly different.

Where simply commissioning this font to be used globally for everything from product to marketing will reduce the amount of time spent on creating design materials (ultimately saving the company money or allowing their employees to focus on more important tasks)?

Or his other point where commissioning this font incurs a one off cost and reduced spending in licensing.

> Since there isn't universal cross-platform fonts, it means you often have to embed fonts, and in some cases license them. Licensing fonts is different than just buying a font file. Even for small developers quality fonts can run up to $50,000 per app (imagine what the licensing costs are for a global company with large userbase!). With licensing you never get exactly what you want in terms of expression and functionality, and other brands can easily buy the same thing.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#142

Post by dspillett »

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…

> All I can gather from this is Airbnb has way too many engineers and designers

This is a perfectly valid job for the design team (with the assistance of the engineering team, initially to make sure they are not missing technical requirements and latterly for implementation).

Presumably (I've not checked) they were previously using either very common font which doesn't stand out at all and/or a licensed font that was costing them money. Sorting the "stand out" issue is important because (much as I hate the fact) branding it important, and sorting any licensing issue could be even more so (licensing costs for typefaces can add up considerably at scale - those designers and engineers could have just saved the business a ton long-term).

Why did they not do this from the start then? That would probably have been premature optimisation. Early on in such a product/company's life-cycle there are growth issues to manage & engineer through/around and unexpected fires to fight, which are more important sinks for your engineering resource, but when the dust starts to settle a bit there is time to deal with important-but-less-urgent matters.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#143

Post by daniel_iversen »

krn wrote: post #140
nemothekid wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But where do we draw the line? Should they be buying cheap Lenovo laptops and second hand furniture for their office too, out of fiduciary duties? I don't mean to be facetious, but my point is that on some level the investors is investing in the company (or more accurately its leadership) and trust they will do the "right" thing... its a heuristics thing - does sweating the details on things that other people may find irrelevant make it so? Not necessarily. Building the brand, culture, product the way that the company deems it best is kind of what its about no? (validated by paying customers, company growth and whatever metrics the VCs and others are looking at).

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#144

Post by Dowwie »

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…

Designers are creatives. It is better to nurture a great team of designers with projects such as these because of the intrinsic rewards the project creates for it's creators. You don't keep design talent around for long unless the work engages creative passions.

The same can be said about software engineers. What is code craftsmanship?

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#145

Post by YokoZar »

Dowwie wrote: post #144
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…

Designers are creatives. It is better to nurture a great team of designers with projects such as these because of the intrinsic rewards the project creates for it's creators. You don't keep design talent around for long unless the work engages creative passions. The same can be said about software engineers. What is code craftsmanship?

The argument was that there are too many designers and engineers. Not keeping the talent around for long is exactly the point.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#146

Post by pilsetnieks »

dx034 wrote: post #132
reilly3000 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In fact, were I inclined so, I could make an airbnb in a weekend. /s

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#147

Post by tomelders »

dawhizkid wrote: post #108
reilly3000 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hmmm, then one has to wonder, how did AirBnb become so successful while so many others have failed? It's a mystery that will tease our imaginations until the end of time no doubt. If only there were some clue, some window into their company and culture that could help us explain this puzzle?

But yeah, seriously, how hard can it be to make AirBnb? It's just a couple of tables in a database, a HTML form and a jQuery image gallery.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#148

Post by jochung »

Retra wrote: post #111
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.

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.

Exactly. They spend all this effort on a font that Joe Average can't tell apart from Arial or Helvetica, and which only a typographer would think is a "distinct typeface" with unique characteristics, seeing as it very closely resembles the existing font they use on this blog.

"We love typography because we see it as a building block for creating meaningful connections around the world." is the kind of word salad that only an art school grad could come up with.

The only substantial point is that they need to support a lot of languages and have readable text for all... So why are they already launching this font with only Latin character support? Because it's a pointless marketing excercise and nobody will care or notice the difference, or the fallback font they'll have included.

This is what happens when you give your design department their own domain name: like birds on the Galapagos islands, they evolve to compete in bizarre and non functional ways, unbothered by external selection pressure.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#149

Post by perk »

I don't really know much it costs to buy a custom font by these designers (Google suggests 150K USD and up).

To me this seems like a pretty cheap (and effective) marketing play by Airbnb.

Re: Airbnb's new typeface

#150

Post by parenthephobia »

krn wrote: post #140
nemothekid wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whilst "what a VC-funded startup should be burning money on" is something that the investors should have input on, I don't think random people on the Internet get to be the gatekeepers for what a company is allowed to do with their investors' money.
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