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Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

arun.is

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Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#191

Post by bunderbunder »

lobotryas wrote: post #127
crispyambulance wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sorry. Thanks, but no need for the phony apology. Typefaces, like other graphic elements, might not be felt to the point of the reader explicitly "recognizing" these contributions. Their impact is real albeit subtle. Designers are aware of that but still work really hard anyway.

How can you demonstrate or prove that the impact is “real”?

Assuming (with a tip of the hat to misterbwong) that you want to demonstrate the impact is real by measuring it, A/B testing would be one of the more popular ways to do it nowadays. The kinds of questions you can ask with it are somewhat limited, so you've got to be worried about the trap of searching where the light is better. But it is so very cheap and easy.

If you have more resources and need to ask questions A/B testing doesn't handle well, you can also do it with good old-fashioned surveying. Take (say) a few hundred people sampled as representatively as possible from your target market. Randomly show half of them a version of the design that uses one typeface, and the other half a version that uses another. Ask them to rate how well they liked the design. See if there's a difference. Or ask them to recall things they saw, and see if there's a difference.

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#192

Post by mark-r »

Jabbles wrote: post #121

I'd like to highlight Google Noto Fonts, which seem to have been made with an entirely different purpose - i.e. not brand recognition: https://www.google.com/get/noto/

Any idea how to get it to work in Windows, particularly MS Word? There appears to be a bug: https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/1273

When you select Noto Sans in Word, you end up with Arial. If you change the font color you can get the correct letter shapes but the spacing is still set for Arial, which looks incredibly bad.

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#193

Post by mmirate »

> Because it’s a waste of somebody’s time and their money if we’re just recreating something for them that already exists.

A waste of their money, yes; but that someone is being paid a share of that money for their time. Therefore, unless that someone is underpaid, then how is this a waste of that someone's time? And more importantly, unless the new client is underpaying, then why does the client's waste-of-money matter to the speaker of this quote?

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#194

Post by cosmie »

msla wrote: post #177
cosmie wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This year I happen to work for a client that licenses all of their brand fonts. Licensed and pay-per-use fonts have easily and quickly worked their way up to the top 5 most agitating things to work with. - They track use by embedding a link to the third party font provider, which does a 302 redirect to a file on your server that requires revalidation every load. So while you host the actual file delivered to the clie…

> They track use by embedding a link to the third party font provider, which does a 302 redirect to a file on your server that requires revalidation every load. GDPR, here we come! > Automated bot traffic, whether benign, malicious, search engines, or anything at all, becomes very expensive. A flood of scrapers hitting your site shifts from a minor nuisance to a very big deal. As they used to say on the chans: "Oh, e…

> GDPR, here we come!

I wish I had that card to play! For that specific provider in the example, their ToS explicitly says that, other than your login credentials, they're allowed to do and distribute any and everything they want with any data they collect from the usage of their service[1]. I'd be really curious to see exactly what usage is hiding behind that clause.

> This would be a wonderful way to financially DDoS some organization you just don't like very much.

Right?! It was mind boggling to learn how easily abused of a system it is. Their ToS even states that it's your problem, not theirs, and any call whatsoever to the "CSS key" (the nonexistent font file on their server that redirects to the real file on your server) is and will be charged as a view. You don't even need to hit the site it's embedded in - just hook up to TOR tunnel and throw a curl command to the "CSS Key" URL into an endless loop. And for optional flourish, add fake user-agent, origin, and referrer headers to the curl command. Let it run for a couple hours every week. Since you didn't hit their site, their site analytics never triggered, and they won't know what hit 'em until months later when it reaches a level that warrants finance asking why you blew so far past your budget.

[1] https://www.typography.com/home/cloud-terms.php

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#195

Post by cosmie »

tomcam wrote: post #188
cosmie wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This year I happen to work for a client that licenses all of their brand fonts. Licensed and pay-per-use fonts have easily and quickly worked their way up to the top 5 most agitating things to work with. - They track use by embedding a link to the third party font provider, which does a 302 redirect to a file on your server that requires revalidation every load. So while you host the actual file delivered to the clie…

Wow. This is one of the most comprehensive and eye-opening posts I’ve ever read on HN. Thank you

An unexpected and unexpectedly gratifying compliment. Thank you!

I managed the digital analytics for that particular client, and an overly aggressive WAF[1] was in place to block scraping attempts because they'd been burned by font fees in the past. The WAF's browser challenge was poorly designed and as a side effect it destroyed all referral (and therefore channel attribution) data.

I had to work my way through a lot of layers within a Fortune 500 company, from my marketing client to their global infrastructure team, to get buy in to test out (and eventually switch) to Cloudflare as a much more robust solution to their font concerns[2]. Which also just so happened to correct the referral/channel attribution issue I was seeing[3]. Along the way I picked up a pretty comprehensive understanding of licensed fonts, as I had to use completely different approaches for each department and set of red tape I needed to cut through. Marketing, media buying, procurement, IT all have different ways you have to frame the risks and opportunities, even if they're all the same thing said different ways.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_application_firewall

[2] The font issue was irrelevant to me. But my referral data was irrelevant to IT, and they put the WAF causing my problems in place due to the font issue. So I able to get procurement and IT's blessing by enticing them with the additional cost savings and protection from the Cloudflare-based solution.

[3] I was only able to get to procurement and IT in the first place by having the backing of marketing and media buying, who cared not at all about fonts but greatly about website performance, conversion attribution, and being able to analyze visitors by traffic source.

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#196

Post by lobotryas »

dceddia wrote: post #137
lobotryas wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem is that after this initial, high value work is done the designers are still on the payroll and they still need to demonstrate their value/be doing something. That’s how you get un-necessary UI redesigns and, arguably, custom typefaces. IMHO, designers just don’t know when to stop.

I think the same could be said of developers. Or, maybe in both cases, it's the companies that don't know when to stop. As a developer, and maybe more relevant here, a user of software, it's kind of surprising how development efforts often continue well past the point of shipping something useful. Now, I'm not arguing that this applies to every software product, or that people should stop at the bare minimum like "we…

The difference is that developers can go on to build new features or even new products for the same company. Can they end up making things worse? Yes, but in such case I personally would blame short-sighted Product Managers chasing the new shiny.

Conversely, designers can not in isolation build a new product and thus are stuck (again, in my opinion) reinventing the wheel for what exists.

And yes, I agree with you that there is a lot of change for its own sake and I wish it would stop regardless of the source. See the recent UI overhaul of gmail. It was enough to force me to use their basic HTML UI and now I’m looking for an alternative all together.

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#197

Post by anoncake »

mark-r wrote: post #174
Mirioron wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean for a font to be GPL? Does it carry the license along into any project you use that font in?

The GPL version was produced to be included with Ghostscript, which itself is GPL, so that wasn't an issue. I'd be very wary of using it with any other project.

That sounds like FUD.

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#198

Post by ardy42 »

KwanEsq wrote: post #182
ardy42 wrote: post #53

> 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…

Fortunately web fonts can be easily disabled in Firefox with the gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled pref in about:config.

> Fortunately web fonts can be easily disabled in Firefox with the gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled pref in about:config.

I've tried that, but unfortunately it breaks websites that use custom fonts for interface icons.

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#199

Post by rangibaby »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #97
rangibaby wrote: post #42

Font licensing is rent-seeking bullshit on the level of "Mickey Mouse" copyright extensions and I'm surprised the big foundries have managed to convince everyone that they need to pay for typefaces, which are explicitly copyright-free in every major jurisdiction.

>which are explicitly copyright-free in every major jurisdiction // Not sure what classes as major jurisdictions for you but I thought that lack of protection for typefaces was a peculiarity of USA-ian copyright? Certainly it appears in the UK that there is typeface protection [CDPA S.55 limits it to <26 years though] and that you can't trace to work around it?

AFAIK typefaces are free according to Japanese law as well.

Re: UK

- Helvetica (to choose one) is over 50 years old

- It is not copyright infringement in the UK to use a font

Re: Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

#200

Post by wiseleo »

amyjess wrote: post #160
Jabbles wrote: post #121

I'd like to highlight Google Noto Fonts, which seem to have been made with an entirely different purpose - i.e. not brand recognition: https://www.google.com/get/noto/

I work on anime fansubs as a hobby, mostly as a typesetter, I use Noto Serif as my main dialogue font, and I default to Noto Sans (in various weights and widths) when I need a regular sans to set on-screen text and signs. It is absolutely perfect . And you know what? I don't think I've gotten a single complaint from anyone about using a serif font for dialogue, which is something that's really uncommon in the fansubb…

I probably have seen your work, so thank you. :)
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