May 15 2018 | By Cliff Kuang for Co. Design
Airbnb’s New Font Holds The Secret To Design’s Future
For a company like Airbnb whose growth hasn’t depended on traditional marketing, its products are its brand. A Super Bowl commercial isn’t as important in spreading the word about Airbnb as the website people see when they first hear about the company or the app they use once they’re a customer. And yet today, apps and websites are more and more similar: Patterns are what makes the modern web usable. That means if you’re Airbnb and your products are now your marketing, and your products have to adhere to the mores of modern web design, there are fewer ways than ever before to set yourself apart.
In this new world, fonts have to carry a greater burden. They have to tell your brand story, in ways that scale up to the size of a massive billboard. And, at the same time, they have to work as a label on a tiny UI button. Two years ago, Airbnb embarked on a quest to solve that challenge with its type design partner, the legendary foundry Dalton Maag. The resulting typeface, called Cereal, hits the world today across Airbnb’s web properties and app. Though it’s currently limited to 12 languages using the Latinate alphabet, the plan is to extend the family to 25 languages, from Russian to Chinese, in the next two years.
Even if you don’t care about fonts, Cereal is a useful example of how an organization’s broader challenges reflect themselves in the details–and how for the details to be right, the organization itself has to change. “Typographic systems are the key to any design, and it’s become more important to create a font that supports all your touchpoints in a clearer way,” says Alex Schleifer, Airbnb’s head of design. “That’s why you’re going to see a lot more organizations thinking about it.”
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