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
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).
This isn't really about some kind of caricature of functionalism that HN commenters subscribe to. It's clear that many tech companies have been commissioning fonts they don't really need, and those fonts are often very similar.
Digital fonts changed the economics of typeface production. There's a glut of independent typeface designers now, creating fonts that I suppose count as valid self-expression. Far more typefaces are being created than are actually needed. It's as if creating a typeface is like performing music; it was one thing for many performers each to play live to a small audience, it's something totally different when all their recordings are available in the same marketplace. The best performances will obviously get a large share of the market, and recordings that take a lot of resources to produce (like a corporate typeface) will exist in a different category to the homemade ones.
As I see it, most of these corporate typefaces lack authenticity. They're typically not a meaningful part of corporate design strategy. It is a cosmetic activity. The exception is those which cover larger that unusual chunks of Unicode.
> 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.
Except that quote has nothing to do with business decision making around aesthetics. It's about arts & entertainment and an existential pondering about human thirst for creativity. For profit software (which is the topic we're talking about here) is about providing a solution to a real world problem.
Summary: Users are more tolerant of minor usability issues when they find an interface visually appealing. This aesthetic-usability effect can mask UI problems and can prevent issue discovery during usability testing. Identify instances of the aesthetic-usability effect in your user research by watching what your users do, as well as listening to what they say.
Simple hypothesis re: music: our evolutionary advantage was our better brains that let us use pattern matching to understand things, so the brain evolved to reward pattern matching, and listening to music presents it with an easy exercise in pattern matching by predicting when the chorus will repeat, expecting chord progressions to be resolved, etc.
Art is good, therefore the choice of this vs that typeface is life-or-death? That doesn't follow, I'm afraid, and the quote is very uneconomical with words relative to the point its making.
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.
The article contains an image [1] showing several tech-company-funded fonts side-by-side.
The fonts have some differences, but I'd have to agree with you the changes are so subtle it's hard to believe they resulted from an attempt to make a _radically_ new typeface.
Wow, I didn't even realise Helvetica needed a licence. Nor that its pay per click:
"When purchasing your digital ad license, you specify the number of impressions your campaign will require. If you’re uncertain how many impressions you will need, you can purchase a small allotment and true up at the end of the month."
I suspect most want something unique for their brand identity. But as always people don't know what they want until they see it, making it very hard to make something interesting that will go through all layers of approval.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
"For the BBC to remain a vital and relevant digital service in an increasingly busy marketplace, we need to appeal to as many people as possible. Having a broader range of expression and visual tonality allows us to stand out in a crowd and aid recognition."
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.
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.
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.
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.
What I find to be rent-seeking bullshit is when licenses impose higher fees on using fonts in PDFs over static images.
Why? Because a pirate can theoretically extract the TTF/OTF from a PDF, so the licensor needs to be paid extra money to compensate for the piracy that PDF usage will bring.
This is such a bullshit 20th-century excuse. It's 2018. Any pirate worth their salt can find any foundry's complete collection on a number of torrent sites. Or for that matter, they can just Google the name of any font and one of the top Google results will be a website illegally offering the font as a free direct download. They don't need to extract a file from a PDF to get their hands on it. There are more efficient ways.
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.
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").
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.
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?)
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
So you go on a rant about 'us' stereotyping designers..by stereotyping us?
I remember all the effort it took to make gradients and borders, fuzzing about with images, hating it, but still doing it because the results were worth it. Then we finally got gradients and box and text shadows, a lot of other things, like some crazy future utopia.. and material design was invented. Humans are weird sometimes.
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.
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.
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
charliecurran|7 years ago
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-jo...
shaan7|7 years ago
theoh|7 years ago
See this tweet and the responses: https://twitter.com/kodform/status/996447044100386816?s=19
Digital fonts changed the economics of typeface production. There's a glut of independent typeface designers now, creating fonts that I suppose count as valid self-expression. Far more typefaces are being created than are actually needed. It's as if creating a typeface is like performing music; it was one thing for many performers each to play live to a small audience, it's something totally different when all their recordings are available in the same marketplace. The best performances will obviously get a large share of the market, and recordings that take a lot of resources to produce (like a corporate typeface) will exist in a different category to the homemade ones.
As I see it, most of these corporate typefaces lack authenticity. They're typically not a meaningful part of corporate design strategy. It is a cosmetic activity. The exception is those which cover larger that unusual chunks of Unicode.
montalbano|7 years ago
"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful."
I definitely see beauty in music, science, typefaces and many other aspects of the universe.
mbesto|7 years ago
Except that quote has nothing to do with business decision making around aesthetics. It's about arts & entertainment and an existential pondering about human thirst for creativity. For profit software (which is the topic we're talking about here) is about providing a solution to a real world problem.
That being said there is some research around aesthetics from a usability perspective: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/aesthetic-usability-effect/
jimmaswell|7 years ago
unknown|7 years ago
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gowld|7 years ago
Why we like music is pretty well studied.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2013/04...
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection_in_humans#Geo...
unknown|7 years ago
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SilasX|7 years ago
everdrive|7 years ago
msla|7 years ago
Rotten194|7 years ago
michaelt|7 years ago
The fonts have some differences, but I'd have to agree with you the changes are so subtle it's hard to believe they resulted from an attempt to make a _radically_ new typeface.
[1] https://www.arun.is/blog/custom-typefaces/unique_typefaces_m...
ian0|7 years ago
"When purchasing your digital ad license, you specify the number of impressions your campaign will require. If you’re uncertain how many impressions you will need, you can purchase a small allotment and true up at the end of the month."
https://www.fonts.com/font/linotype/helvetica/licenses
executesorder66|7 years ago
wongarsu|7 years ago
endorphone|7 years ago
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.
unknown|7 years ago
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Vanderson|7 years ago
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.
unknown|7 years ago
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ardy42|7 years ago
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/knpga...).
asaph|7 years ago
Why?
ramraj07|7 years ago
KwanEsq|7 years ago
ken|7 years ago
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|7 years ago
johneth|7 years ago
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/gel/articles/introducing-bbc-reith
gadders|7 years ago
I love designer talk.
52-6F-62|7 years ago
https://fontsinuse.com/tags/758/the-new-york-times
baxtr|7 years ago
ry4nolson|7 years ago
niklasrde|7 years ago
stencil25|7 years ago
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|7 years ago
bryanrasmussen|7 years ago
>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|7 years ago
rangibaby|7 years ago
fsloth|7 years ago
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.
bovermyer|7 years ago
pbhjpbhj|7 years ago
Not sure what classes as major jurisdictions for you but I thought that lack of protection for typefaces was a peculiarity of USA-ian copyright?
Certainly it appears in the UK that there is typeface protection [CDPA S.55 limits it to <26 years though] and that you can't trace to work around it?
amyjess|7 years ago
Why? Because a pirate can theoretically extract the TTF/OTF from a PDF, so the licensor needs to be paid extra money to compensate for the piracy that PDF usage will bring.
This is such a bullshit 20th-century excuse. It's 2018. Any pirate worth their salt can find any foundry's complete collection on a number of torrent sites. Or for that matter, they can just Google the name of any font and one of the top Google results will be a website illegally offering the font as a free direct download. They don't need to extract a file from a PDF to get their hands on it. There are more efficient ways.
bshimmin|7 years ago
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|7 years ago
Odenwaelder|7 years ago
tru3_power|7 years ago
redler|7 years ago
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201703394
[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0881792128
paulmckeever|7 years 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.
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
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|7 years ago
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.
jarjoura|7 years ago
mark-r|7 years ago
koboll|7 years ago
amyjess|7 years ago
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.
dmitriid|7 years ago
anonu|7 years ago
I wasn't aware that these common fonts charged royalties...
zapzupnz|7 years ago
EastLondonCoder|7 years ago
kadfak|7 years ago
LanceH|7 years ago
amyjess|7 years ago
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.
spectrum1234|7 years ago
What am I missing?
mark-r|7 years ago
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.
wtallis|7 years ago
Jabbles|7 years ago
https://www.google.com/get/noto/
amyjess|7 years ago
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.
mark-r|7 years ago
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.
chasedehan|7 years ago
floatboth|7 years ago
chipaca|7 years ago
I don't know how big it was when it made the font though.
balefrost|7 years ago
hackerbrother|7 years ago
Kiro|7 years ago
Pulcinella|7 years ago
jvagner|7 years ago
hbosch|7 years ago
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.
noir_lord|7 years ago
So you go on a rant about 'us' stereotyping designers..by stereotyping us?
Bold.
PavlovsCat|7 years ago
O_H_E|7 years ago
duxup|7 years ago
p0nce|7 years ago
nerdponx|7 years ago
majewsky|7 years ago
CamTin|7 years ago
tanilama|7 years ago
deltron3030|7 years ago
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fipple|7 years ago
paulie_a|7 years ago
andrewstetsenko|7 years ago
mmirate|7 years ago
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hpbd|7 years ago
aaaaaaaaaab|7 years ago
whytaka|7 years ago
thrower123|7 years ago
iagooar|7 years ago
ghaff|7 years ago
mc32|7 years ago
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|7 years ago
Good typography can make a massive difference to the presentation of text. To some people that makes it worth the effort