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 doing there day to day.
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 level compliance to manage, and I’m sure a huge back office to help their various legal efforts.
I’m convinced that any business that operates at global scale needs an army of engineers doing, training to do, and coordinating across hundreds of technical areas.
Or is hiring engineers somehow so glamourous that doing so outweighs the profit motive?
I'll use an iceberg analogy: There are moving parts behind the scene making websites' wheels turn that you're not considering. I'm sure there are projects behind the scenes at Airbnb that are interesting but aren't apparent from an outside perspective. Don't judge a product's complexity by their landing page.
Since you worked for Uber, someone could say Uber only has a mobile presence so it's less complex and less interesting than a full website.
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.
As an example of what some of the engineering people do, that wouldn't be an immediately obvious need if you haven't been involved in running global businesses at scale:
A tiny part of what they need all these resources for.
Obviously running any sufficiently large business on a global basis is a tad more complicated than simply keeping a website up that can absorb usage spikes.
> 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.
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.
The designers do a lot of product development-- or it seems that way based n the narrative. The website is not AirBnBs product, they sell the entire experience. I get the sense it is a much more designer centric place than engineering.That said, i am sure the engineers are optimizing not only the site but the reams of inbound data that comes with a global business. Clearly they must defend against fraud, protect their users, do identity verification and other data intensive predictions. Its up to you whether these are "hard" or "interesting" but they probably do have a ton going on at their scale and while it is conparatively simple to google/fb i think you are dismissing a lot of challenges that may not be immeadiately obvious.
One of the people involved in the project and answering questions in the article. Happy to answer more questions.
We talk about reasoning for Cereal in the article and in my case study too[1]. In large organizations, you often have tens or hundreds of designers, support multiple platforms (ios, android, web(mac, windows, linux) and do ad campaigns around the world. When it comes to typefaces, there really isn't any universal system fonts (other than Arial maybe), that are available on all platforms. If you use different fonts on each platform, the design will be slightly different, trying to manage a cross-platform design system (like we do [2]) 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. If the marketing then also uses different type, it will look slightly off if you include product shots (one reason why Apple now uses SF everywhere). Short answer: having multiple fonts causes additional work and can confuse people, especially inside the company.
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.
As the last point, what I find really exciting that we can now consider font kind of like a software. We change it whenever we find problems or just want to improve something. That is usually not possible with licensing. Obviously, you would and should only do your own typeface if you have these kind of issues and care enough wanting to solve them.
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?
> If you use different fonts on each platform, the design will be slightly different
Oh no, the fonts will look different on different devices! Better commission a custom font.
Back in the day, we just accepted that was how the web worked.
Jokes aside, I see why you'd want consistency across devices and print. But what's wrong with using an open source typeface, or modifying one for your purposes?
> and other brands can easily buy the same things.
Why do you think a unique font is essential for branding? Some well known fonts are in use by many companies.
The difference between a fontset that looks similar and a fontset that solves for all the business requirements can be vast. Cereal appears to be extremely versatile and distinct in a few key areas. You don't need a custom font to distinguish your brand from others, but you probably do if you're going to be using that one typeface for every damn thing in every damn scenario.
Why do they use a screenshot with a typo for demonstration purposes? Beautiful is misspelled as "beutiful". Why are all these companies designing their own fonts. It's not needed and for primarily mobile-based apps it ends up being jarring.
A: Maybe to bring attention to the font? To the letters that are missing or those that are present? Maybe just because they can.
Q: Why are all these companies designing their own fonts. It's not needed...
A: Many reasons. It can be cheaper than licensing other fonts. It makes their apps (and brand) stand out. Or people might find it more aesthetically pleasing. The perceived `need` for it, has nothing to do with whether or not you need it for their app/website to function properly. And maybe `jarring` is exactly what they want.
Does anyone else with astigmatism notice that the e, c, and even the a are way too closed off? Especially for print (and on the heavier weights), good luck distinguishing these characters from far away with an o.
i find it fascinating how bizarrely hostile to a company developing a new font some people are. it's just branding and identity, like logos, color schemes and design languages. not really a big deal. but holy smokes do people talk a lot of shit about fonts... for whatever reason. what's going on? is it really about the company, and not the font?
> Our Latin character set has a few hundred characters but Chinese Simplified, for example, has over 27,000. We intend to expand to include script systems used by our global community including Chinese, Japanese, Devanagari, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Greek, and Thai, and that will take time.
Good luck with that. I wonder how long that will take.
Is it just me, or is the design motif that airbnb is adopting in this post fairly similar to dropbox's? I'm also reminded of it in the new gmail interface.
I‘m not at all a font expert or even geek, so forgive me if that’s dumb: Do all those new product fonts look like Circular [1]? It’s always struck me as a very unique font, but it’s becoming less unique every day it seems.
I liken this to a hotel that decides to make their own lightbulbs. Or a department store that produces it's own bespoke cash registers.
You can't argue that typography is so vital to their business that this is a useful allocation of resources. Obviously, design is important to any company that markets itself in some way. But not every company designs their own typeface (although it seems like it, lately.)
Some are saying it's important for AirBnB to have their own distinct look, and that requires a custom typeface. BS. Plenty of successful companies managed to create a distinct brand identity using helvetica.
Some are saying it's cheaper to make your own typeface than to license one. Really? There are no cheaper typefaces that look suitable? (I'm not saying this is impossible. I'm genuinely curious. Is that how bad it is?)
We have open source typography. Are none of those fonts suitable for their purpose? Can any of them be improved by the designers at AirBnB? That sounds like it would be cheaper than starting from scratch.
I care about beautiful typography as much as the next web designer / marketer / start up-whatever. But I also know how a business runs. And this seems like something the business should not focus on. Tell me I'm wrong.
This is as much about designers and egoists jerking themselves off in the service of a new 'corporate identity' as it is about a meaningful evolution in image.
You're wrong, and I don't get the impression that you care as much about beautiful typography as much as the next web designer / marketer / start up-whatever. Design is about solving problems. I'd offer up the analogy of Starbucks where I happen to be sitting and working. They create much of their own everything as part of creating a consistent environment for an innumerable amount of possible circumstances in which their stores need to be successful. If it's not bespoke, it's selected which is perfectly fine to do. Sometimes that doesn't work, sometimes it does. Sometimes you want that as your constraint so the object you're making is more easily repairable with commodity parts. Sometimes you're in the market of building the most popular gadgets in the world and you're the only one maintaining them.
Having stayed in various hotels (including expensive ones) which used atrocious lightbulbs, I would’t mind if some of them decided to choose lightbulbs more carefully.
Manufacturing might be a bit overboard, as that takes running a factory, but if a hotel wanted to partner with an existing lightbulb factory to commission lightbulbs matching the hotel’s spec, that might be a nice feature.
In the case of lightbulbs, they could probably find something available off the shelf which matched whatever reasonable spec they might develop. But for a large hotel chain, ordering custom lightbulbs probably wouldn’t break the bank.
* * *
Helvetica is an awful typeface for anything but posters, logos, and headlines. Please never use Helvetica for body copy.
Why do you presume to say what AirBnB "should not" do? You get to run your business according to your priorities, as does AirBnB's CEO.
> Plenty of successful companies managed to create a distinct brand identity using helvetica.
You could use this logic to criticize basically any company expenditure as frivolous. Plenty of companies do things that probably aren't strictly necessary for their survival. I for one am grateful to live in a world where companies sometimes do interesting and creative things, even if it isn't an obvious and immediate win on the balance sheet.
I'd actually be moderately surprised if there were no extant hotel companies that have commissioned a typeface. They might not have bragged about it, and you might not have heard about it, but it's not like it's an unthinkable thing to do.
> I liken this to a hotel that decides to make their own lightbulbs.
The key differentiator between AirBnB and a hotel is the community. By adopting a more flippant variation of the well-known humanist sans-serif fonts, they're communicating that their experience is more about the people and the connections than just the physical infrastructure of a boring old Helvetica hotel.
Having their own typeface is good strategically because it helps to create a moat around the product experience.
It's similar to how Wal-Mart created their own typeface to double down on their American-as-apple-pie branding. Now every time you drive past a Wal-Mart, the font tells that story before you even walk into the store.
[+] [-] dawhizkid|7 years ago|reply
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 doing there day to day.
[+] [-] reilly3000|7 years ago|reply
I’m convinced that any business that operates at global scale needs an army of engineers doing, training to do, and coordinating across hundreds of technical areas.
Or is hiring engineers somehow so glamourous that doing so outweighs the profit motive?
[+] [-] welder|7 years ago|reply
Since you worked for Uber, someone could say Uber only has a mobile presence so it's less complex and less interesting than a full website.
[+] [-] nemothekid|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shimms|7 years ago|reply
https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/tracking-the-money-sca...
A tiny part of what they need all these resources for.
Obviously running any sufficiently large business on a global basis is a tad more complicated than simply keeping a website up that can absorb usage spikes.
[+] [-] dspillett|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] adventured|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ggg9990|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wand3r|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bernardino|7 years ago|reply
Paging the gang over at Twitter.
[+] [-] krstffr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brailsafe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Reedx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enra|7 years ago|reply
We talk about reasoning for Cereal in the article and in my case study too[1]. In large organizations, you often have tens or hundreds of designers, support multiple platforms (ios, android, web(mac, windows, linux) and do ad campaigns around the world. When it comes to typefaces, there really isn't any universal system fonts (other than Arial maybe), that are available on all platforms. If you use different fonts on each platform, the design will be slightly different, trying to manage a cross-platform design system (like we do [2]) 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. If the marketing then also uses different type, it will look slightly off if you include product shots (one reason why Apple now uses SF everywhere). Short answer: having multiple fonts causes additional work and can confuse people, especially inside the company.
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.
As the last point, what I find really exciting that we can now consider font kind of like a software. We change it whenever we find problems or just want to improve something. That is usually not possible with licensing. Obviously, you would and should only do your own typeface if you have these kind of issues and care enough wanting to solve them.
[1]: https://airbnb.design/working-type/
[2]: https://airbnb.design/building-a-visual-language/
[+] [-] brailsafe|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] gregoire|7 years ago|reply
[1]: https://press.atairbnb.com/media-assets/?categ=Logos
[+] [-] mozumder|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baal232|7 years ago|reply
Oh no, the fonts will look different on different devices! Better commission a custom font.
Back in the day, we just accepted that was how the web worked.
Jokes aside, I see why you'd want consistency across devices and print. But what's wrong with using an open source typeface, or modifying one for your purposes?
> and other brands can easily buy the same things.
Why do you think a unique font is essential for branding? Some well known fonts are in use by many companies.
[+] [-] tomc1985|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] invalidusernam3|7 years ago|reply
The font looks almost identical to a lot of other sans fonts.
[+] [-] brailsafe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slowmotiony|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deft|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atanasb|7 years ago|reply
Q: why do they use a screenshot with a typo.
A: Maybe to bring attention to the font? To the letters that are missing or those that are present? Maybe just because they can.
Q: Why are all these companies designing their own fonts. It's not needed...
A: Many reasons. It can be cheaper than licensing other fonts. It makes their apps (and brand) stand out. Or people might find it more aesthetically pleasing. The perceived `need` for it, has nothing to do with whether or not you need it for their app/website to function properly. And maybe `jarring` is exactly what they want.
[+] [-] djrobstep|7 years ago|reply
Too much money, too much time on their hands, too much ego-driven decision-making.
[+] [-] spdustin|7 years ago|reply
Was Netflix Sans the determined starting point?
[+] [-] Keloo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iooi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heartbreak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abiox|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kccqzy|7 years ago|reply
Good luck with that. I wonder how long that will take.
[+] [-] adambware|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freese|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobarbazetc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woolvalley|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manmal|7 years ago|reply
1: https://lineto.com/The+Fonts/Font+Categories/Text+Fonts/Circ...
[+] [-] jasondebo|7 years ago|reply
Anybody?
[+] [-] webnrrd2k|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baal232|7 years ago|reply
You can't argue that typography is so vital to their business that this is a useful allocation of resources. Obviously, design is important to any company that markets itself in some way. But not every company designs their own typeface (although it seems like it, lately.)
Some are saying it's important for AirBnB to have their own distinct look, and that requires a custom typeface. BS. Plenty of successful companies managed to create a distinct brand identity using helvetica.
https://99designs.com/blog/creative-inspiration/famous-logos...
Some are saying it's cheaper to make your own typeface than to license one. Really? There are no cheaper typefaces that look suitable? (I'm not saying this is impossible. I'm genuinely curious. Is that how bad it is?)
We have open source typography. Are none of those fonts suitable for their purpose? Can any of them be improved by the designers at AirBnB? That sounds like it would be cheaper than starting from scratch.
I care about beautiful typography as much as the next web designer / marketer / start up-whatever. But I also know how a business runs. And this seems like something the business should not focus on. Tell me I'm wrong.
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|7 years ago|reply
Especially considering their customer service and product quality (read: host integrity) issues.
[+] [-] tomc1985|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brailsafe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobolus|7 years ago|reply
Manufacturing might be a bit overboard, as that takes running a factory, but if a hotel wanted to partner with an existing lightbulb factory to commission lightbulbs matching the hotel’s spec, that might be a nice feature.
In the case of lightbulbs, they could probably find something available off the shelf which matched whatever reasonable spec they might develop. But for a large hotel chain, ordering custom lightbulbs probably wouldn’t break the bank.
* * *
Helvetica is an awful typeface for anything but posters, logos, and headlines. Please never use Helvetica for body copy.
[+] [-] haberman|7 years ago|reply
> Plenty of successful companies managed to create a distinct brand identity using helvetica.
You could use this logic to criticize basically any company expenditure as frivolous. Plenty of companies do things that probably aren't strictly necessary for their survival. I for one am grateful to live in a world where companies sometimes do interesting and creative things, even if it isn't an obvious and immediate win on the balance sheet.
[+] [-] asfasgasg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ggg9990|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Alex3917|7 years ago|reply
The key differentiator between AirBnB and a hotel is the community. By adopting a more flippant variation of the well-known humanist sans-serif fonts, they're communicating that their experience is more about the people and the connections than just the physical infrastructure of a boring old Helvetica hotel.
Having their own typeface is good strategically because it helps to create a moat around the product experience.
It's similar to how Wal-Mart created their own typeface to double down on their American-as-apple-pie branding. Now every time you drive past a Wal-Mart, the font tells that story before you even walk into the store.
[+] [-] perk|7 years ago|reply
To me this seems like a pretty cheap (and effective) marketing play by Airbnb.
[+] [-] Froyoh|7 years ago|reply