The answer is cost. Then they get a guy wearing all black and tortoiseshell glasses to tart it up in some language about identity and authenticity.
Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?
101–110 of 205 posts
Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?
#102This is one of those times where as a working creative that frequently reads Hacker News I straight up face palm. I have to imagine a lot of these commenters would say the same in regards to any sort of subjective artistic choice that isn't purely optimized for efficiency. I would like to leave you with a quote by Briano Eno from a really good lecture he gave several years ago that I hope can provide a jumping off po…
Art is good, therefore the choice of this vs that typeface is life-or-death? That doesn't follow, I'm afraid, and the quote is very uneconomical with words relative to the point its making.
Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?
#103This is one of those times where as a working creative that frequently reads Hacker News I straight up face palm. I have to imagine a lot of these commenters would say the same in regards to any sort of subjective artistic choice that isn't purely optimized for efficiency. I would like to leave you with a quote by Briano Eno from a really good lecture he gave several years ago that I hope can provide a jumping off po…
Art is good, therefore the choice of this vs that typeface is life-or-death? That doesn't follow, I'm afraid, and the quote is very uneconomical with words relative to the point its making.
"And, yet, none of it seems to have much to do with functionalism, with staying alive and certainly not with industries I would say."
That's exactly what the quote says. You're being very uncharitable with your interpretation.
Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Art is good, therefore the choice of this vs that typeface is life-or-death? That doesn't follow, I'm afraid, and the quote is very uneconomical with words relative to the point its making.
"And, yet, none of it seems to have much to do with functionalism, with staying alive and certainly not with industries I would say." That's exactly what the quote says. You're being very uncharitable with your interpretation.
Either way, it's not thing that would come close to justifying the extreme importance these tech companies are placing on it.
If you disagree, can you articulate the point in your own words so that others can see the subtlety it's missing?
The point of clear communication is so that someone can understand your argument without having to squint and struggle.
Edit: To which I would add, the point of quoting someone else's thoughts is because they ostensibly communicate it better than you yourself can. I think this quote fails that.
Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?
#105This is one of those times where as a working creative that frequently reads Hacker News I straight up face palm. I have to imagine a lot of these commenters would say the same in regards to any sort of subjective artistic choice that isn't purely optimized for efficiency. I would like to leave you with a quote by Briano Eno from a really good lecture he gave several years ago that I hope can provide a jumping off po…
Simple hypothesis re: music: our evolutionary advantage was our better brains that let us use pattern matching to understand things, so the brain evolved to reward pattern matching, and listening to music presents it with an easy exercise in pattern matching by predicting when the chorus will repeat, expecting chord progressions to be resolved, etc.
Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?
#106> Why are tech companies making custom typefaces? Because they hate me. I disable font smoothing on my machines. Custom typefaces usually have poor hinting, which means they look terrible without smoothing (e.g. inconstant line thickness and inconsistent spacing). The fonts that ship with Windows and Mac OS are wonderfully hinted, and appear crisp and clean without font smoothing. I curse the day web fonts were inven…
Do you still use a 1024 x 768 monitor or what?
If your web interface breaks because someone is trying to see it on a small monitor, you probably did something very wrong on your end.
Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?
#107I work as a developer at a growing startup, who creates a widget which is inserted into a vendor webpage, much like Intercom's chat bubble. We spent a lot of time ensuring our build came in as small as possible, in order to reduce server costs and page load times, for millions of potential users. Suddenly, the creative side of the business wanted to add our own font to the application. The bespoke font files (woff2&1…
not to mention that its hard to stop custom fonts 'popping in'
Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I would not trust an open source process to maintain a standard of quality. On what basis?
On a hunch. I may be wrong. It seems to me that a font, suitable for printing, is a niche product with a very old history of proprietary providers and craftsmen. It's this crafts aspect which makes the open sourcing a bit more difficult, IMO. I.e you need specialists to maintain a certain quality.
A font doesn’t require continuous maintenance.
Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?
#109Not only companies, Sweden has this for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Sans
Estonia also created its own font for branding purposes recently called Aino: https://brand.estonia.ee/design/typography/
Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?
#110The primary reason is that with sans serif fonts there are fewer pixels to send. This isn't really a big deal until you get to the size of Google or Facebook and it really starts to add up.