13 ms·

Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

262 points by richtr 8y ago

bryanrasmussen 8y ago
>I can’t help but feel that some of these companies wanted a >custom typeface simply because that’s what everyone else is >doing. This cargo cult mentality that is so prevalent in >design is at best wasteful and at worst illegal. Illegal?!? I'm going to need to see some work on this part. I couldn't find anything in the article that seemed to directly support the assertion. on edit: formatting
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  Yeah, the author needs to either remove that or clarify that point. That being said, I think the author means that all of these new type faces are very similar and so they may be infringing. Or that the companies want a familiar type face but don't want to pay for it, so they commission a look-a-like. But, that's just a very large grasp on my part from reading the article.
  - Vanderson 8y ago
    He may be bringing up the issue that it's perfectly legal to copy another font visually as long as you don't copy the font's data. (maybe something the author doesn't understand?)
    - gowld 8y ago
      How is that true? Can I copy a book or a painting visually as long as I don't copy its "data"?
      - Vanderson 8y ago
        Fonts and typefaces have unique copyright laws that are different from other forms of art/communication. I made a more detailed comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18541934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18541934
      - true_religion 8y ago
        No, but typefaces are specifically excluded from copyright. An alphabet is considered to be utilitarian, not art.
  - bryanrasmussen 8y ago
    perhaps it's just me but I always take illegal to mean criminally liable, if they meant civil liabilities I guess maybe eh, but it still needs some clarification.
  - amyjess 8y ago
    It may be different in other countries, but in the US font design cannot be copyrighted. The TTF/OTF files can, and so can the hinting algorithms, but the actual design of the font is legally guaranteed to be copyrightable by anyone. Why? Because a long time ago, the US government was worried that somebody would exploit a loophole and try to copyright the alphabet. So they set up protections to absolutely make sure nobody can do this. Interestingly, this means that text-only logos like the Coca-Cola logo can't be copyrighted; they're only protected by trademark.
johneth 8y ago
It's not just tech companies. The BBC has commissioned a typeface[1] for their massively varied output, to cut down on licensing costs. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/gel/articles/introducing-bbc-reith https://www.bbc.co.uk/gel/articles/introducing-bbc-reith
- baxtr 8y ago
  Aren't the fonts Google provides free of charge? At least for web-design?
  - johneth 8y ago
    They use it in multiple languages (World Service), mediums (TV, online, print), and use-cases (serious for news, legible for preschoolers learning to read, edgy for comedy trailers, etc.), for which the web fonts may be too limited or restrictive in number and variation of styles or characters. It's also an opportunity to brand something as uniquely theirs, unlike a Google web font that anybody can use.
    - niklasrde 8y ago
      Just to note, that print here refers mostly to advertising and corporate brochures. We do have magazines and merchandise for some franchises, but as far as I know, those were secondary when it came to BBC Reith/Reith Sans. TV & Online are big, and especially when it comes to legibility across resolutions and encoding systems (PAL/NTSC/SD/Pixel Ratios/HD/4K/Mobile/High-DPI..)
  - hrktb 8y ago
    By curiosity, are they guaranteed to be free forever ? I know that the current licensing is as open as it can be, but if Google or the actual legal owner changes its mind, will the current users need to go through a clearing of everything they have that uses the font ? I would guess there’s no guarantee, and wouldn’t take that risk if I was in the BBC.
    - 8y ago
Rotten194 8y ago
I don't think most tech companies actually want a completely custom, radically new typeface. They want a designer to trace Helvetica so they don't have to pay licensing fees.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- endorphone 8y ago
  Tiny customizations yield a unique outcome that can become more brand affiliated. But if they do just want to avoid licensing..and? If it's less expensive to go through the design and construction and acceptance and branding, then the typeface is probably a tad overpriced. A grotesque sans-serif is a grotesque sans-serif, not a rip off of Helvetica. It doesn't own that entire concept. While I find this piece interesting and informative, it seems biased in what it considers a useful outcome and what it doesn't. YouTube cutting off "random" pieces, for instance, yields a playful and unique typeface.
- executesorder66 8y ago
  There are good looking open source fonts. So I don't think that's true.
  - oneplusone 8y ago
    I have yet to see an open source font that comes even close to a professional font like Helvetica.
    - anoncake 8y ago
      What's wrong with Nimbus Sans?
      - mark-r 8y ago
        Nimbus Sans was designed to be a complete lookalike for Helvetica. I'm not sure how they got away with it, except that the IP laws protecting fonts are rather weak. Besides, I don't think it's open source.
iagooar 8y ago
I've never understood the fuzz about typography. Yes, it's important that fonts that are used a lot meet certain standards - but some people seem to make a big deal out of it.
- ghaff 8y ago
  It’s almost as bad as programmers with all their stupid languages and frameworks. </s>
- mc32 8y ago
  It’s almost akin to politicians fussing about what tie to wear to a debate. People don’t care in the least, but politicians’ advisors will insist on these things over the actual positions the politician represents. In the end, as many are saying, it’s probably about licensing fees. Just don’t make a major faux pas. Don’t wear a paisley tie, don’t use comic sans nor lobster unless you have a good reason.
- wongarsu 8y ago
  Some people spend a lot of time color coordinating their clothes, some just wear whatever. Some people try to make everything they write look beautiful while making it easier to read, some people just type the letters and don't care. Good typography can make a massive difference to the presentation of text. To some people that makes it worth the effort
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    Based on the state of the web in 2018, with it's pop-ups in the middle of the page, cookie warning, laggy scrolling, and image pop-in that moves what you're reading, I find it very difficult to believe that that many people actually care much about the presentation of text.
    - aczerepinski 8y ago
      The fact that marketers get to make their contributions to a website doesn't negate that there's a designer involved who probably cares about typography, color, space, etc.
EastLondonCoder 8y ago
Not only companies, Sweden has this for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Sans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Sans
- kadfak 8y ago
  Estonia also created its own font for branding purposes recently called Aino: https://brand.estonia.ee/design/typography/ https://brand.estonia.ee/design/typography/
tanilama 8y ago
Because they have the resources to do it abd they want that level of control?
charliecurran 8y ago
This 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 point for alternate ways to think about style, and why I think y'all are asking the wrong questions. "So the first question is, why is any of that important? Why do we do it? And notice it’s not only us relatively wealthy people, in terms of global wealth, who are doing it - it’s everybody that we know of. Every human group we know of is spending a lot of their time – in fact almost all of their surplus time and energy – is spent in the act of stylising things and enjoying other people’s stylisations of things. So my question is, what is it for? In fact, my friend Danny Hillus, who’s a scientist, was asked by a well-known science website, along with about 300 other scientists, he was asked what is the most interesting scientific question at the moment? A lot of the other people replied with things about the cosmological constant and Ryman’s Hypothesis and all these very complicated things. And his question was very simple: he said why do we like music? And if you start thinking about that, that is really one of the most mysterious things you can imagine. Why do we even have an interest in music? Why do we have preferences? Why do we like this song better than that one? Why do we like this Beethoven sonata better than that Beethoven sonata? Why do we like this performance of that same sonata better than that other performance? We had very fine distinctions about things that we prefer, aesthetic things. And, yet, none of it seems to have much to do with functionalism, with staying alive and certainly not with industries I would say." - Brian Eno https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/speeches/2015/bbc-music-john-peel-lecture https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/speeches/2015/bbc-music-jo...
- shaan7 8y ago
  Actually the content of the article makes this comment slightly unwarranted (unless I'm misreading the tone). The author has described, quite well, on how typography isn't about just subjective artistic choice but largely its functional implications. Oh and there is a reason why a lot of engineering folks have critical opinions about this. Some of us have worked with designers in the past that simply do not take the effort to explain why a certain design choice was made (even though they put a painful amount of thought into the process). At my office, it took our engineering and design team a lot of time to finally figure out what was missing. Now our discussions have designers going into details of choices which makes it so clear that most of them aren't subjective at all (some are, and that is fine).
deltron3030 8y ago
For the same reason some people want tailor made suits.
koboll 8y ago
There's nothing like putting Circular side-by-side with a handful of its imitators to demonstrate how much tighter, sharper, and better-balanced Circular is than any of them.
nerdponx 8y ago
Interesting to see Source Code/Sans/Serif Pro left out of the discussion.
- majewsky 8y ago
  Adobe is a foundry, so it's not surprising that they design fonts. The more surprising part of the Source Pro family is the license afaik.
bshimmin 8y ago
Another reason is support for multiple languages. Many companies in western countries may start by using a typeface that only covers Latin script. I was doing some work with Nokia around the time they released Nokia Pure, and I can certainly say that multiple language support was, at least for us, one of the primary drivers for using it, and it made our lives a lot easier at the time.
- harimau777 8y ago
  It would be interesting to see a resource that paired up equivalent fonts in different scripts. It could take into account form ("This Arabic font uses similar shapes to Helvetica"), function ("This is the Chinese 'default' front similar to Times New Roman"), and what the font implies ("This font is used as a 'futuristic' font in Japanese similar to Eurostyle or Bank Gothic in Latin script").
Vanderson 8y ago
"The idea that typefaces (rather than fonts, which are computer software) cannot be copyrighted in the United States is black letter law. 37 C.F.R. § 202.1(e). Under U.S. law, typefaces and their letter forms or glyphs are considered utilitarian objects whose public utility outweighs any private interest in protecting their creative elements." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti... There is an interesting history of font copying going back to the beginning of the USA. Where the US printers wanted to use European fonts (typefaces?), but didn't want to be hampered by their copyright laws. So there was no copyright protections of fonts in the US. IANAL but Adobe lost some court case on this recently where they tried to accuse someone of "stealing/copying" a font. But since you can't copyright the alphabet, you can only copyright the font's actual data. In theory you could trace any font you want in a font design program, and it is now legally yours. Which makes sense if you are a business that uses fonts (ie a software company) as a primary part of your product instead of a permanent fee to a font provider.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
CamTin 8y ago
Why did courtiers at Versailles spend their hordes of gold on the latest finery?
stencil25 8y ago
I 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, thanks lord) we were given were almost 5x the size of the initial build package. All the worth of optimisation, right?
- jackpeterfletch 8y ago
  not to mention that its hard to stop custom fonts 'popping in'
dmitriid 8y ago
And then these fonts can't display anything outside of the ASCII range (or, rarely, outside the Latin-1 range).
hpbd 8y ago
Because they hire lots of designers and they have to keep them busy so they don't leave.
rangibaby 8y ago
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.
- bovermyer 8y ago
  Just out of curiosity, how would you suggest that foundries make money?
  - asaph 8y ago
    I believe GP is implying that they don't deserve to make money from a copyright-free asset.
  - antidesitter 8y ago
    Perhaps the GP is suggesting that they aren’t owed money.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    Tech support.
- fsloth 8y ago
  Mickey Mouse is just a character. Font faces can be considered critical technical components in the printing process. If you are using a typeface to print a metric ton of publications, I'm pretty sure you would want it to be engineered to be fit for that purpose. And that the typeface definitions retains its' quality. I would not trust an open source process to maintain a standard of quality. Hence, you need an institution to maintain the quality. Which needs funding. What is the "correct" price for the font foundries services is of course a different matter altogether.
  - antidesitter 8y ago
    > I would not trust an open source process to maintain a standard of quality. On what basis?
aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
Fascinating! I guess I'm gonna continue blocking all custom web fonts like I've been doing for the past 5 years :)
- whytaka 8y ago
  How do you do this?
  - aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
    https://collinmbarrett.com/block-web-fonts/ https://collinmbarrett.com/block-web-fonts/
    - whytaka 8y ago
      Thank you!
paulmckeever 8y ago
The article suggests that tech companies believe brand is important, and therefore invest in building custom typefaces to save on licensing fees. That doesn't really hold up. The cost of developing a custom typeface can easily run from hundreds of thousands into millions of dollars. It can take a huge amount of time and energy from within the company to commission and direct a large creative project. Typeface licensing costs are a very small proportion of what most companies will spend on brand marketing. And saving money on a small line-item isn't exactly a recipe for getting promoted. Announcing that your shiny new typeface will save the company lots of money is, more likely, a post-purchase rationalisation that helps make everyone feel good about the investment. If the driver was primarily to reduce licensing costs, there are some great alternatives: 1. Use one of the many terrific free and open source typefaces that will cover all the languages and use cases you really need (like Noto or Open Sans). Or even better, system fonts. Jeremiah Shoaf has a terrific curated list here: https://www.typewolf.com/google-fonts https://www.typewolf.com/google-fonts 2. Threaten to use a free alternative and then negotiate a better deal on licensing 3. Go ahead and use your favourite typeface without declaring the full usage so it is unlicensed or under-licensed. This saves a lot of money and is actually pretty common. In the past I've interviewed designers and creative teams about how they choose and decide to license typefaces. They talk about things like: * wanting to create exactly the right aesthetic for their brand (i.e. I can only be satisfied by something that doesn't yet exist) * finding usage-based licensing complex as it creates non-financial costs in terms of understanding, tracking and justifying the licensing costs. That all gets much easier if you own the typeface. * reducing the risk of inadvertent copyright infringement and subsequent reputational damage * feeling in control by owning the IP (and therefore not dependent on any third party in future)
- taitems 8y ago
  > That doesn't really hold up. The cost of developing a custom typeface can easily run from hundreds of thousands into millions of dollars. No-one's arguing the up front investment in creating the font, but instead focusing on the "rent-seeking behaviour" that sees the recurring costs come in anywhere up to $1M a year. Some foundries charge you per pageview and per mobile app developer. There is a company/audience size at which keeping track of pageviews and seat count and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars or perhaps millions per year is significantly more trouble than the initial hurt of commissioning a typeface. At the end of the exercise you can wrap it up as a marketing or branding opportunity and generate a few hundred thousand pageviews and call it a day.
duxup 8y ago
It's design.... why get all design happy about anything? Because humans like aesthetics.
ardy42 8y ago
> 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 invented and gave the industry bad excuses not to use them. Google is the absolute worst here. They use custom fonts heavily now, and somehow they're not even blockable with the Font Blocker extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/font-blocker/knpgaobajhnhgkhhoopjepghknapnikl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/font-blocker/knpga...).
- ramraj07 8y ago
  Do you still use a 1024 x 768 monitor or what?
  - ardy42 8y ago
    > Do you still use a 1024 x 768 monitor or what? No, I have some nice, large 16:10 monitors. However, that brings up a good point: if you're designing your stuff to only look good on a MacBook's retina display, you're doing it wrong.
    - rleigh 8y ago
      You need to cater for both nowadays, I think. I recently upgraded from a 26" 16:10 1920×1200 display to a similarly-sized 16:9 4K display. I ran them side-by-side for a few days to compare. The difference in text quality was night and day. After using the 4K for a week the quality of the old display looked terrible: blurry and unreadable. Like going back to 800×600! I sold it; I saw no value in it as a secondary display. If I do ever need a second, it will be another 4K. Or 8K when it's available and affordable. If you're developing, writing or reading all day long, the improved legibility makes such a difference for ease of reading, eyestrain and headaches that it makes little sense to retain the old. We clearly need to support low DPI displays for some time to come; the installed base is huge. However, high DPI displays are the future, and it's going to be increasingly a requirement that they are also properly catered for. I'm not a particularly big fan of the trend by Microsoft (for example) to use very thin fonts with Windows 10. Just because you can to show off the technology, doesn't mean you should. I'd prefer bolder, more easily legible text even with a hi-DPI display, even if the thin ones are fashionable for some reason.
thrower123 8y ago
Designers are on the payroll, and feel like they have to be doing something...
tru3_power 8y ago
Typography is awesome and I like how this article conveys the functional aspect of it. Does anyone know of any good readings about typefaces (specifically about ratios that letters should adhere to?)
- redler 8y ago
  Try "Stop Stealing Sheep" [1] or "The Elements of Typographic Style" [2] [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201703394 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201703394 [2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0881792128 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0881792128
  - Pulcinella 8y ago
    I will say that “The Elements of Typographic Style” is still the standard and probably one of the most ‘Textbook’ typography books, it’s still primarily concerned with book typography. It does go into computers and how they have affected typography, but still largely in terms of book layout engines and such. Bringhurst doesn’t even get into other forms of print typography like posters, let alone apps and websites.
chasedehan 8y ago
I’m curious why Ubuntu as a font was included on this list. While it technically is a font, it’s a font shipped with an OS. There is no mention in the article about problems with default fonts shipped with windows or macOS.
- chipaca 8y ago
  I assume it's to underline the "smaller" argument. Working at Canonical, none of the other companies on that list is "small". I think AirBnB is the smallest that isn't us, and it's got over a thousand. I don't know how big it was when it made the font though.
- balefrost 8y ago
  San Francisco (Apple's font) is also mentioned.
- hackerbrother 8y ago
  I really dislike this font
- floatboth 8y ago
  They use it for branding too: https://www.ubuntu.com https://www.ubuntu.com
paulie_a 8y ago
That's why I simply lock all fonts in my browser to a very limited set with a min and Max size.
fipple 8y ago
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.
LanceH 8y ago
The 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.
- amyjess 8y ago
  I just wish they'd at least use a humanist sans. I was really sad when Google switched Android's default font from Droid Sans, a humanist sans (and the direct predecessor of Noto Sans), to Roboto, a neo-grotesk. Or when Apple went from Myriad to Helevetica Neue and San Francisco. I just really hate everything about the way neo-grotesk fonts look, and mobile UIs have looked awful to me ever since.
  - LanceH 8y ago
    I think for Apple is was more about it being organic and locally sourced.
wtallis 8y ago
I don't generally mind a company having a standard typography as part of its public image. But it irks me that Qualcomm's website delivers webfonts to ensure that every "Q" that appears anywhere on their site is rendered as their logo, even in body text where their logo is a significant distraction and harm to readability.
Kiro 8y ago
I don't understand how typeface licensing works. I normally just pay once and be done with it (essentially buying it) but this thread makes it sound like you need to pay by usage or something?
- Pulcinella 8y ago
  It depends on the use case and who you are licensing it from.
jarjoura 8y ago
The article didn't mention Arial from Microsoft all the way back in 1982! And it's probably one of the most used "Helvetica"-like (to avoid licensing) fonts ever.
- mark-r 8y ago
  The article was about recent trends, not ancient history.
danmg 8y ago
I wouldn't know. I disable all custom typefaces.
spectrum1234 8y ago
Are there not open source fonts? Seems like this ecosystem would be very large, since so many designers want to enhance their portfolio. Basically any font should be a commodity. What am I missing?
- mark-r 8y ago
  You're missing two things. First, the history of typography - fonts were not always free to copy and use when there were physical parts involved. Second, fonts are something that take a lot of work to put together, especially when done well. Most people can't devote that kind of effort for free. That said, open source fonts are definitely on the rise. Many people don't have a problem using a font that isn't quite as refined as the classics, and some enlightened companies are bankrolling development.
ken 8y ago
You can tell how old a car is by the extra words on the back under the name. "Fuel injected"? 1980's or 1990's. "Hybrid"? 2000's or 2010's. Similarly, you can tell the era of computer software by what strange thing they decide they need to customize. We're in the era of "slight variants of Helvetica". (Nobody's asking for a Zapfino clone, strangely.) For whatever reason, fonts and logotypes are the axis on which everybody seems to need to compete today. And gratuitous 2D animation. We already went through the "custom sound" phase, and it (mostly) went out of style, thankfully. Splash screens are also on the way out, since we no longer need a way to hide long loading times. I wonder what's next. Gratuitous 3D animation? Custom smells? Plaids? To be clear, I have no problem with nice fonts on my computer, but I think it's funny that everyone is so focused on showing off their creativity on this one very specific axis. You really can't think of any other possible ways to have functional style?
- freehunter 8y ago
  Personally I think the problem is the over-use of analytics in page design. No one can compete on page design anymore because it doesn't convert well with focus groups or in A/B testing, so every page looks like a Bootstrap template. So they try to find SOMETHING that won't put up lower conversion numbers yet is slightly different so they can say their page is unique.
  - ken 8y ago
    Good point. It's probably a design focus of companies because it's named, and self-contained. You can put "Font" on a schedule, and a budget, and an A/B test. Your programmers can't really complain that it makes any other task more complex. It's the holy grail of design: some pixie dust you can sprinkle on at the end, which impacts nothing but makes everything prettier. If, say, physics-engine-based layouts became popular for general user interfaces, it would take over the entire development of the product. It would affect every part of the budget and schedule and architecture. You couldn't feasibly A/B test it.
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    Custom fonts are generally bad for conversion too.
anonu 8y ago
> Developing a custom typeface can eliminate the recurring licensing fees that must be paid to foundries. IBM [4] and Netflix [5] claim to save millions of dollars per year by switching from Helvetica to IBM Plex and Gotham to Netflix Sans, respectively. I wasn't aware that these common fonts charged royalties...
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  The prices are swallowed by operating system vendors, usually. Same with codec licences and so on.
Jabbles 8y ago
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/ https://www.google.com/get/noto/
- amyjess 8y ago
  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 fansubbing community (there is a tendency to stick to old taboos, even though the reasons why serif fonts were avoided are no longer valid now that almost everyone, including me, only releases softsubs). It's just that gorgeous. The widths and weights Noto is available in is also massively useful to me. There have been times I've tried to set some text, observed that the regular is too light and the bold is too heavy... and then I remember that Noto has a demi. Or when it started to irk me that the width of the font didn't harmonize well with the width of the Japanese text and I started to play with \fscx until I realized that I could just use Noto Sans SemiCondensed and get something that's optically sound. And the best part is that it's all open-source.
  - wiseleo 8y ago
    I probably have seen your work, so thank you. :)
- mark-r 8y ago
  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 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.
p0nce 8y ago
Because it's cool as hell.
Odenwaelder 8y ago
I've been to a talk about the new Lufthansa CI in Frankfurt a few weeks ago and asked this very question — why move away from Helvetica? The answer was, first, Helvetica's readability on screen is apparently not very good, and second, Lufthansa had to pay massive licensing fees in order to use Helvetica.
andrewstetsenko 8y ago
following the thread to learn the names of the popular fonts :)
jvagner 8y ago
I was previously the CEO of a type design & distribution company, if anybody has questions about the commercial side of things.
hbosch 8y ago
I have a (fair warning) rant here that is likely going to ding my HN karma, but here-goes. I work closely with design and I am consistently saddened by the state of the tech industry when design discussions pop up on HN. They almost always devolve into a cesspool of blanket criticism and rejection. "Those designers..." an HN commenter will inevitably say, "...all they care about is making things look pretty." Well, sure. Yes. The facts are plain, and actually boring. Customers like pretty products. Well-designed experiences and objects, compared to purely utilitarian products of similar functional capabilities, will always sell better. They create more passionate users and make more money. This is understood by businesses across the world, almost forever. To read an HN thread on design with no previous convictions is to see a world where designers are scam artists and their contributions to the tech industry nothing but snake oil. Of course there is excess. That's also obvious. Tarsnap and Pinboard are HN darlings and they clearly place all their emphasis on functional design rather than visual design, and are very successful businesses. Craigslist as well is one of these types of businesses. But these companies do not appeal to average consumers. Pinboard doesn't compete with Pinterest for users – nor could it ever, nor does it wish to. Would I, as a proponent for modern design sensibilities, argue that Craigslist doesn't have good design? No! They have fantastic design... for them. It suits their brand. Would Netflix be functional if it had a "Web 1.0" Craigslist-style interface? Yes! But people would hate it. It wouldn't suit Netflix. It would look terrible in a living room on a TV, for one, but Netflix is a platform for cinematic experiences and the branding and interface should allow designers the kind of control that let's them create a suitably cinematic interface – however they wish to do that. Craigslist works, by comparison, because it is essentially a glorified newsletter (hot take!). The price of a custom typeface, depending on who you commission to make it, can probably range between $100,000 and $500,000 or something like that. For a mature business like Airbnb or Netflix or Google this is not an investment in efficiency or in growth. This probably makes the HN reader's head explode. It is an exercise in fashion and style and distinction. There is a reason that the console-dwelling set is often stereotyped as the guy in poorly-fitting jeans and neon sneakers and a hoodie with a shark high-fiving a sasquatch on the front... they often don't waste time on considering things like fashion or style or distinction. One mentor told me that "Design is anything that makes people more successful". Sometimes this is making one button red and one button green, for example. Sometimes it is about aligning critical actions to the edges of the experience, a la Fitts' Law. But I think this is a narrow understanding of what design can be. Design is also about creating a visual atmosphere, a well-defined world for the narrative of a product to become more than it's functions. Software is allowed to have an emotional quality to it, it is good to delight users with little illustrations and round buttons. An interface should have feeling, and mood, and a vibe to it. Personality and soul is always, at some level, designed – visually and functionally in equally significant parts.
amyjess 8y ago
All I can say is that Noto has been one of the most wonderful gifts Google has given the world. An ultra-high-quality, visually attractive font family that includes a wide array of weights and even a decent selection of widths on top of what is quite possibly the best Unicode support in the world. I'm at the point where I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth and just be thankful I have Noto for my typesetting projects.
mmirate 8y ago
> 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?

262 points by richtr 8y ago

>I can’t help but feel that some of these companies wanted a >custom typeface simply because that’s what everyone else is >doing. This cargo cult mentality that is so prevalent in >design is at best wasteful and at worst illegal. Illegal?!? I'm going to need to see some work on this part. I couldn't find anything in the article that seemed to directly support the assertion. on edit: formatting

JustSomeNobody 8y ago
Yeah, the author needs to either remove that or clarify that point. That being said, I think the author means that all of these new type faces are very similar and so they may be infringing. Or that the companies want a familiar type face but don't want to pay for it, so they commission a look-a-like. But, that's just a very large grasp on my part from reading the article.
- Vanderson 8y ago
  He may be bringing up the issue that it's perfectly legal to copy another font visually as long as you don't copy the font's data. (maybe something the author doesn't understand?)
  - gowld 8y ago
    How is that true? Can I copy a book or a painting visually as long as I don't copy its "data"?
    - Vanderson 8y ago
      Fonts and typefaces have unique copyright laws that are different from other forms of art/communication. I made a more detailed comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18541934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18541934
    - true_religion 8y ago
      No, but typefaces are specifically excluded from copyright. An alphabet is considered to be utilitarian, not art.
- bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  perhaps it's just me but I always take illegal to mean criminally liable, if they meant civil liabilities I guess maybe eh, but it still needs some clarification.
- amyjess 8y ago
  It may be different in other countries, but in the US font design cannot be copyrighted. The TTF/OTF files can, and so can the hinting algorithms, but the actual design of the font is legally guaranteed to be copyrightable by anyone. Why? Because a long time ago, the US government was worried that somebody would exploit a loophole and try to copyright the alphabet. So they set up protections to absolutely make sure nobody can do this. Interestingly, this means that text-only logos like the Coca-Cola logo can't be copyrighted; they're only protected by trademark.

johneth 8y ago

It's not just tech companies. The BBC has commissioned a typeface[1] for their massively varied output, to cut down on licensing costs. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/gel/articles/introducing-bbc-reith https://www.bbc.co.uk/gel/articles/introducing-bbc-reith

baxtr 8y ago
Aren't the fonts Google provides free of charge? At least for web-design?
- johneth 8y ago
  They use it in multiple languages (World Service), mediums (TV, online, print), and use-cases (serious for news, legible for preschoolers learning to read, edgy for comedy trailers, etc.), for which the web fonts may be too limited or restrictive in number and variation of styles or characters. It's also an opportunity to brand something as uniquely theirs, unlike a Google web font that anybody can use.
  - niklasrde 8y ago
    Just to note, that print here refers mostly to advertising and corporate brochures. We do have magazines and merchandise for some franchises, but as far as I know, those were secondary when it came to BBC Reith/Reith Sans. TV & Online are big, and especially when it comes to legibility across resolutions and encoding systems (PAL/NTSC/SD/Pixel Ratios/HD/4K/Mobile/High-DPI..)
- hrktb 8y ago
  By curiosity, are they guaranteed to be free forever ? I know that the current licensing is as open as it can be, but if Google or the actual legal owner changes its mind, will the current users need to go through a clearing of everything they have that uses the font ? I would guess there’s no guarantee, and wouldn’t take that risk if I was in the BBC.
  - 8y ago

Rotten194 8y ago

I don't think most tech companies actually want a completely custom, radically new typeface. They want a designer to trace Helvetica so they don't have to pay licensing fees.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
endorphone 8y ago
Tiny customizations yield a unique outcome that can become more brand affiliated. But if they do just want to avoid licensing..and? If it's less expensive to go through the design and construction and acceptance and branding, then the typeface is probably a tad overpriced. A grotesque sans-serif is a grotesque sans-serif, not a rip off of Helvetica. It doesn't own that entire concept. While I find this piece interesting and informative, it seems biased in what it considers a useful outcome and what it doesn't. YouTube cutting off "random" pieces, for instance, yields a playful and unique typeface.
executesorder66 8y ago
There are good looking open source fonts. So I don't think that's true.
- oneplusone 8y ago
  I have yet to see an open source font that comes even close to a professional font like Helvetica.
  - anoncake 8y ago
    What's wrong with Nimbus Sans?
    - mark-r 8y ago
      Nimbus Sans was designed to be a complete lookalike for Helvetica. I'm not sure how they got away with it, except that the IP laws protecting fonts are rather weak. Besides, I don't think it's open source.

iagooar 8y ago

I've never understood the fuzz about typography. Yes, it's important that fonts that are used a lot meet certain standards - but some people seem to make a big deal out of it.

ghaff 8y ago
It’s almost as bad as programmers with all their stupid languages and frameworks. </s>
mc32 8y ago
It’s almost akin to politicians fussing about what tie to wear to a debate. People don’t care in the least, but politicians’ advisors will insist on these things over the actual positions the politician represents. In the end, as many are saying, it’s probably about licensing fees. Just don’t make a major faux pas. Don’t wear a paisley tie, don’t use comic sans nor lobster unless you have a good reason.
wongarsu 8y ago
Some people spend a lot of time color coordinating their clothes, some just wear whatever. Some people try to make everything they write look beautiful while making it easier to read, some people just type the letters and don't care. Good typography can make a massive difference to the presentation of text. To some people that makes it worth the effort
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Based on the state of the web in 2018, with it's pop-ups in the middle of the page, cookie warning, laggy scrolling, and image pop-in that moves what you're reading, I find it very difficult to believe that that many people actually care much about the presentation of text.
  - aczerepinski 8y ago
    The fact that marketers get to make their contributions to a website doesn't negate that there's a designer involved who probably cares about typography, color, space, etc.

EastLondonCoder 8y ago

Not only companies, Sweden has this for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Sans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Sans

kadfak 8y ago
Estonia also created its own font for branding purposes recently called Aino: https://brand.estonia.ee/design/typography/ https://brand.estonia.ee/design/typography/

tanilama 8y ago

Because they have the resources to do it abd they want that level of control?

charliecurran 8y ago

This 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 point for alternate ways to think about style, and why I think y'all are asking the wrong questions. "So the first question is, why is any of that important? Why do we do it? And notice it’s not only us relatively wealthy people, in terms of global wealth, who are doing it - it’s everybody that we know of. Every human group we know of is spending a lot of their time – in fact almost all of their surplus time and energy – is spent in the act of stylising things and enjoying other people’s stylisations of things. So my question is, what is it for? In fact, my friend Danny Hillus, who’s a scientist, was asked by a well-known science website, along with about 300 other scientists, he was asked what is the most interesting scientific question at the moment? A lot of the other people replied with things about the cosmological constant and Ryman’s Hypothesis and all these very complicated things. And his question was very simple: he said why do we like music? And if you start thinking about that, that is really one of the most mysterious things you can imagine. Why do we even have an interest in music? Why do we have preferences? Why do we like this song better than that one? Why do we like this Beethoven sonata better than that Beethoven sonata? Why do we like this performance of that same sonata better than that other performance? We had very fine distinctions about things that we prefer, aesthetic things. And, yet, none of it seems to have much to do with functionalism, with staying alive and certainly not with industries I would say." - Brian Eno https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/speeches/2015/bbc-music-john-peel-lecture https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/speeches/2015/bbc-music-jo...

shaan7 8y ago
Actually the content of the article makes this comment slightly unwarranted (unless I'm misreading the tone). The author has described, quite well, on how typography isn't about just subjective artistic choice but largely its functional implications. Oh and there is a reason why a lot of engineering folks have critical opinions about this. Some of us have worked with designers in the past that simply do not take the effort to explain why a certain design choice was made (even though they put a painful amount of thought into the process). At my office, it took our engineering and design team a lot of time to finally figure out what was missing. Now our discussions have designers going into details of choices which makes it so clear that most of them aren't subjective at all (some are, and that is fine).

deltron3030 8y ago

For the same reason some people want tailor made suits.

koboll 8y ago

There's nothing like putting Circular side-by-side with a handful of its imitators to demonstrate how much tighter, sharper, and better-balanced Circular is than any of them.

nerdponx 8y ago

Interesting to see Source Code/Sans/Serif Pro left out of the discussion.

majewsky 8y ago
Adobe is a foundry, so it's not surprising that they design fonts. The more surprising part of the Source Pro family is the license afaik.

bshimmin 8y ago

Another reason is support for multiple languages. Many companies in western countries may start by using a typeface that only covers Latin script. I was doing some work with Nokia around the time they released Nokia Pure, and I can certainly say that multiple language support was, at least for us, one of the primary drivers for using it, and it made our lives a lot easier at the time.

harimau777 8y ago
It would be interesting to see a resource that paired up equivalent fonts in different scripts. It could take into account form ("This Arabic font uses similar shapes to Helvetica"), function ("This is the Chinese 'default' front similar to Times New Roman"), and what the font implies ("This font is used as a 'futuristic' font in Japanese similar to Eurostyle or Bank Gothic in Latin script").

Vanderson 8y ago

"The idea that typefaces (rather than fonts, which are computer software) cannot be copyrighted in the United States is black letter law. 37 C.F.R. § 202.1(e). Under U.S. law, typefaces and their letter forms or glyphs are considered utilitarian objects whose public utility outweighs any private interest in protecting their creative elements." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti... There is an interesting history of font copying going back to the beginning of the USA. Where the US printers wanted to use European fonts (typefaces?), but didn't want to be hampered by their copyright laws. So there was no copyright protections of fonts in the US. IANAL but Adobe lost some court case on this recently where they tried to accuse someone of "stealing/copying" a font. But since you can't copyright the alphabet, you can only copyright the font's actual data. In theory you could trace any font you want in a font design program, and it is now legally yours. Which makes sense if you are a business that uses fonts (ie a software company) as a primary part of your product instead of a permanent fee to a font provider.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

CamTin 8y ago

Why did courtiers at Versailles spend their hordes of gold on the latest finery?

stencil25 8y ago

I 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, thanks lord) we were given were almost 5x the size of the initial build package. All the worth of optimisation, right?

jackpeterfletch 8y ago
not to mention that its hard to stop custom fonts 'popping in'

dmitriid 8y ago

And then these fonts can't display anything outside of the ASCII range (or, rarely, outside the Latin-1 range).

hpbd 8y ago

Because they hire lots of designers and they have to keep them busy so they don't leave.

rangibaby 8y ago

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.

bovermyer 8y ago
Just out of curiosity, how would you suggest that foundries make money?
- asaph 8y ago
  I believe GP is implying that they don't deserve to make money from a copyright-free asset.
- antidesitter 8y ago
  Perhaps the GP is suggesting that they aren’t owed money.
- tptacek 8y ago
  Tech support.
fsloth 8y ago
Mickey Mouse is just a character. Font faces can be considered critical technical components in the printing process. If you are using a typeface to print a metric ton of publications, I'm pretty sure you would want it to be engineered to be fit for that purpose. And that the typeface definitions retains its' quality. I would not trust an open source process to maintain a standard of quality. Hence, you need an institution to maintain the quality. Which needs funding. What is the "correct" price for the font foundries services is of course a different matter altogether.
- antidesitter 8y ago
  > I would not trust an open source process to maintain a standard of quality. On what basis?

aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago

Fascinating! I guess I'm gonna continue blocking all custom web fonts like I've been doing for the past 5 years :)

whytaka 8y ago
How do you do this?
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
  https://collinmbarrett.com/block-web-fonts/ https://collinmbarrett.com/block-web-fonts/
  - whytaka 8y ago
    Thank you!

paulmckeever 8y ago

The article suggests that tech companies believe brand is important, and therefore invest in building custom typefaces to save on licensing fees. That doesn't really hold up. The cost of developing a custom typeface can easily run from hundreds of thousands into millions of dollars. It can take a huge amount of time and energy from within the company to commission and direct a large creative project. Typeface licensing costs are a very small proportion of what most companies will spend on brand marketing. And saving money on a small line-item isn't exactly a recipe for getting promoted. Announcing that your shiny new typeface will save the company lots of money is, more likely, a post-purchase rationalisation that helps make everyone feel good about the investment. If the driver was primarily to reduce licensing costs, there are some great alternatives: 1. Use one of the many terrific free and open source typefaces that will cover all the languages and use cases you really need (like Noto or Open Sans). Or even better, system fonts. Jeremiah Shoaf has a terrific curated list here: https://www.typewolf.com/google-fonts https://www.typewolf.com/google-fonts 2. Threaten to use a free alternative and then negotiate a better deal on licensing 3. Go ahead and use your favourite typeface without declaring the full usage so it is unlicensed or under-licensed. This saves a lot of money and is actually pretty common. In the past I've interviewed designers and creative teams about how they choose and decide to license typefaces. They talk about things like: * wanting to create exactly the right aesthetic for their brand (i.e. I can only be satisfied by something that doesn't yet exist) * finding usage-based licensing complex as it creates non-financial costs in terms of understanding, tracking and justifying the licensing costs. That all gets much easier if you own the typeface. * reducing the risk of inadvertent copyright infringement and subsequent reputational damage * feeling in control by owning the IP (and therefore not dependent on any third party in future)

taitems 8y ago
> That doesn't really hold up. The cost of developing a custom typeface can easily run from hundreds of thousands into millions of dollars. No-one's arguing the up front investment in creating the font, but instead focusing on the "rent-seeking behaviour" that sees the recurring costs come in anywhere up to $1M a year. Some foundries charge you per pageview and per mobile app developer. There is a company/audience size at which keeping track of pageviews and seat count and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars or perhaps millions per year is significantly more trouble than the initial hurt of commissioning a typeface. At the end of the exercise you can wrap it up as a marketing or branding opportunity and generate a few hundred thousand pageviews and call it a day.

duxup 8y ago

It's design.... why get all design happy about anything? Because humans like aesthetics.

ardy42 8y ago

> 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 invented and gave the industry bad excuses not to use them. Google is the absolute worst here. They use custom fonts heavily now, and somehow they're not even blockable with the Font Blocker extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/font-blocker/knpgaobajhnhgkhhoopjepghknapnikl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/font-blocker/knpga...).

ramraj07 8y ago
Do you still use a 1024 x 768 monitor or what?
- ardy42 8y ago
  > Do you still use a 1024 x 768 monitor or what? No, I have some nice, large 16:10 monitors. However, that brings up a good point: if you're designing your stuff to only look good on a MacBook's retina display, you're doing it wrong.
  - rleigh 8y ago
    You need to cater for both nowadays, I think. I recently upgraded from a 26" 16:10 1920×1200 display to a similarly-sized 16:9 4K display. I ran them side-by-side for a few days to compare. The difference in text quality was night and day. After using the 4K for a week the quality of the old display looked terrible: blurry and unreadable. Like going back to 800×600! I sold it; I saw no value in it as a secondary display. If I do ever need a second, it will be another 4K. Or 8K when it's available and affordable. If you're developing, writing or reading all day long, the improved legibility makes such a difference for ease of reading, eyestrain and headaches that it makes little sense to retain the old. We clearly need to support low DPI displays for some time to come; the installed base is huge. However, high DPI displays are the future, and it's going to be increasingly a requirement that they are also properly catered for. I'm not a particularly big fan of the trend by Microsoft (for example) to use very thin fonts with Windows 10. Just because you can to show off the technology, doesn't mean you should. I'd prefer bolder, more easily legible text even with a hi-DPI display, even if the thin ones are fashionable for some reason.

thrower123 8y ago

Designers are on the payroll, and feel like they have to be doing something...

tru3_power 8y ago

Typography is awesome and I like how this article conveys the functional aspect of it. Does anyone know of any good readings about typefaces (specifically about ratios that letters should adhere to?)

redler 8y ago
Try "Stop Stealing Sheep" [1] or "The Elements of Typographic Style" [2] [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201703394 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201703394 [2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0881792128 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0881792128
- Pulcinella 8y ago
  I will say that “The Elements of Typographic Style” is still the standard and probably one of the most ‘Textbook’ typography books, it’s still primarily concerned with book typography. It does go into computers and how they have affected typography, but still largely in terms of book layout engines and such. Bringhurst doesn’t even get into other forms of print typography like posters, let alone apps and websites.

chasedehan 8y ago

I’m curious why Ubuntu as a font was included on this list. While it technically is a font, it’s a font shipped with an OS. There is no mention in the article about problems with default fonts shipped with windows or macOS.

chipaca 8y ago
I assume it's to underline the "smaller" argument. Working at Canonical, none of the other companies on that list is "small". I think AirBnB is the smallest that isn't us, and it's got over a thousand. I don't know how big it was when it made the font though.
balefrost 8y ago
San Francisco (Apple's font) is also mentioned.
hackerbrother 8y ago
I really dislike this font
floatboth 8y ago
They use it for branding too: https://www.ubuntu.com https://www.ubuntu.com

paulie_a 8y ago

That's why I simply lock all fonts in my browser to a very limited set with a min and Max size.

fipple 8y ago

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.

LanceH 8y ago

The 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.

amyjess 8y ago
I just wish they'd at least use a humanist sans. I was really sad when Google switched Android's default font from Droid Sans, a humanist sans (and the direct predecessor of Noto Sans), to Roboto, a neo-grotesk. Or when Apple went from Myriad to Helevetica Neue and San Francisco. I just really hate everything about the way neo-grotesk fonts look, and mobile UIs have looked awful to me ever since.
- LanceH 8y ago
  I think for Apple is was more about it being organic and locally sourced.

wtallis 8y ago

I don't generally mind a company having a standard typography as part of its public image. But it irks me that Qualcomm's website delivers webfonts to ensure that every "Q" that appears anywhere on their site is rendered as their logo, even in body text where their logo is a significant distraction and harm to readability.

Kiro 8y ago

I don't understand how typeface licensing works. I normally just pay once and be done with it (essentially buying it) but this thread makes it sound like you need to pay by usage or something?

Pulcinella 8y ago
It depends on the use case and who you are licensing it from.

jarjoura 8y ago

The article didn't mention Arial from Microsoft all the way back in 1982! And it's probably one of the most used "Helvetica"-like (to avoid licensing) fonts ever.

mark-r 8y ago
The article was about recent trends, not ancient history.

danmg 8y ago

I wouldn't know. I disable all custom typefaces.

spectrum1234 8y ago

Are there not open source fonts? Seems like this ecosystem would be very large, since so many designers want to enhance their portfolio. Basically any font should be a commodity. What am I missing?

mark-r 8y ago
You're missing two things. First, the history of typography - fonts were not always free to copy and use when there were physical parts involved. Second, fonts are something that take a lot of work to put together, especially when done well. Most people can't devote that kind of effort for free. That said, open source fonts are definitely on the rise. Many people don't have a problem using a font that isn't quite as refined as the classics, and some enlightened companies are bankrolling development.

ken 8y ago

You can tell how old a car is by the extra words on the back under the name. "Fuel injected"? 1980's or 1990's. "Hybrid"? 2000's or 2010's. Similarly, you can tell the era of computer software by what strange thing they decide they need to customize. We're in the era of "slight variants of Helvetica". (Nobody's asking for a Zapfino clone, strangely.) For whatever reason, fonts and logotypes are the axis on which everybody seems to need to compete today. And gratuitous 2D animation. We already went through the "custom sound" phase, and it (mostly) went out of style, thankfully. Splash screens are also on the way out, since we no longer need a way to hide long loading times. I wonder what's next. Gratuitous 3D animation? Custom smells? Plaids? To be clear, I have no problem with nice fonts on my computer, but I think it's funny that everyone is so focused on showing off their creativity on this one very specific axis. You really can't think of any other possible ways to have functional style?

freehunter 8y ago
Personally I think the problem is the over-use of analytics in page design. No one can compete on page design anymore because it doesn't convert well with focus groups or in A/B testing, so every page looks like a Bootstrap template. So they try to find SOMETHING that won't put up lower conversion numbers yet is slightly different so they can say their page is unique.
- ken 8y ago
  Good point. It's probably a design focus of companies because it's named, and self-contained. You can put "Font" on a schedule, and a budget, and an A/B test. Your programmers can't really complain that it makes any other task more complex. It's the holy grail of design: some pixie dust you can sprinkle on at the end, which impacts nothing but makes everything prettier. If, say, physics-engine-based layouts became popular for general user interfaces, it would take over the entire development of the product. It would affect every part of the budget and schedule and architecture. You couldn't feasibly A/B test it.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  Custom fonts are generally bad for conversion too.

anonu 8y ago

> Developing a custom typeface can eliminate the recurring licensing fees that must be paid to foundries. IBM [4] and Netflix [5] claim to save millions of dollars per year by switching from Helvetica to IBM Plex and Gotham to Netflix Sans, respectively. I wasn't aware that these common fonts charged royalties...

zapzupnz 8y ago
The prices are swallowed by operating system vendors, usually. Same with codec licences and so on.

Jabbles 8y ago

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/ https://www.google.com/get/noto/

amyjess 8y ago
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 fansubbing community (there is a tendency to stick to old taboos, even though the reasons why serif fonts were avoided are no longer valid now that almost everyone, including me, only releases softsubs). It's just that gorgeous. The widths and weights Noto is available in is also massively useful to me. There have been times I've tried to set some text, observed that the regular is too light and the bold is too heavy... and then I remember that Noto has a demi. Or when it started to irk me that the width of the font didn't harmonize well with the width of the Japanese text and I started to play with \fscx until I realized that I could just use Noto Sans SemiCondensed and get something that's optically sound. And the best part is that it's all open-source.
- wiseleo 8y ago
  I probably have seen your work, so thank you. :)
mark-r 8y ago
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 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.

p0nce 8y ago

Because it's cool as hell.

Odenwaelder 8y ago

I've been to a talk about the new Lufthansa CI in Frankfurt a few weeks ago and asked this very question — why move away from Helvetica? The answer was, first, Helvetica's readability on screen is apparently not very good, and second, Lufthansa had to pay massive licensing fees in order to use Helvetica.

andrewstetsenko 8y ago

following the thread to learn the names of the popular fonts :)

jvagner 8y ago

I was previously the CEO of a type design & distribution company, if anybody has questions about the commercial side of things.

hbosch 8y ago

I have a (fair warning) rant here that is likely going to ding my HN karma, but here-goes. I work closely with design and I am consistently saddened by the state of the tech industry when design discussions pop up on HN. They almost always devolve into a cesspool of blanket criticism and rejection. "Those designers..." an HN commenter will inevitably say, "...all they care about is making things look pretty." Well, sure. Yes. The facts are plain, and actually boring. Customers like pretty products. Well-designed experiences and objects, compared to purely utilitarian products of similar functional capabilities, will always sell better. They create more passionate users and make more money. This is understood by businesses across the world, almost forever. To read an HN thread on design with no previous convictions is to see a world where designers are scam artists and their contributions to the tech industry nothing but snake oil. Of course there is excess. That's also obvious. Tarsnap and Pinboard are HN darlings and they clearly place all their emphasis on functional design rather than visual design, and are very successful businesses. Craigslist as well is one of these types of businesses. But these companies do not appeal to average consumers. Pinboard doesn't compete with Pinterest for users – nor could it ever, nor does it wish to. Would I, as a proponent for modern design sensibilities, argue that Craigslist doesn't have good design? No! They have fantastic design... for them. It suits their brand. Would Netflix be functional if it had a "Web 1.0" Craigslist-style interface? Yes! But people would hate it. It wouldn't suit Netflix. It would look terrible in a living room on a TV, for one, but Netflix is a platform for cinematic experiences and the branding and interface should allow designers the kind of control that let's them create a suitably cinematic interface – however they wish to do that. Craigslist works, by comparison, because it is essentially a glorified newsletter (hot take!). The price of a custom typeface, depending on who you commission to make it, can probably range between $100,000 and $500,000 or something like that. For a mature business like Airbnb or Netflix or Google this is not an investment in efficiency or in growth. This probably makes the HN reader's head explode. It is an exercise in fashion and style and distinction. There is a reason that the console-dwelling set is often stereotyped as the guy in poorly-fitting jeans and neon sneakers and a hoodie with a shark high-fiving a sasquatch on the front... they often don't waste time on considering things like fashion or style or distinction. One mentor told me that "Design is anything that makes people more successful". Sometimes this is making one button red and one button green, for example. Sometimes it is about aligning critical actions to the edges of the experience, a la Fitts' Law. But I think this is a narrow understanding of what design can be. Design is also about creating a visual atmosphere, a well-defined world for the narrative of a product to become more than it's functions. Software is allowed to have an emotional quality to it, it is good to delight users with little illustrations and round buttons. An interface should have feeling, and mood, and a vibe to it. Personality and soul is always, at some level, designed – visually and functionally in equally significant parts.

amyjess 8y ago

All I can say is that Noto has been one of the most wonderful gifts Google has given the world. An ultra-high-quality, visually attractive font family that includes a wide array of weights and even a decent selection of widths on top of what is quite possibly the best Unicode support in the world. I'm at the point where I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth and just be thankful I have Noto for my typesetting projects.

mmirate 8y ago

> 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?