Episode Details

In this episode, Mary (Senior Director, Brand), and Nirzar (AI Design Lead) discuss why we developed a new typeface, how we implemented it, and its role in communicating our personality.

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Mary: Hi everyone and welcome to DuckTales where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology and people building privacy tools for everyone. I’m Mary. I work on the brand side here at DuckDuckGo. Today we’re talking all things typography and more specifically how we developed DuckSans, our new custom typeface. So I’m here with Nirzar who beyond being our product design lead for AI, he’s a real typeface nerd and complained about our previous default typeface for, I don’t know, like five years, five plus years. So we had him lead the effort so he will be able to answer all of our questions. Nirzar, thanks for joining.

Nirzar: But yeah, Hey, hi, I’m glad we’re talking about fonts.

Mary: First prop use of the conversation. All right, I’m jumping right in. For folks who are less familiar, why does a typeface matter? Why not just use the defaults? What is the benefit? What are you trying to do by creating a custom one?

Nirzar: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think there is nothing wrong with using defaults to be honest. Nowadays default typefaces for operating systems are very well designed. Take San Francisco, Sans for example, by Apple is very well designed typeface and it’s going to be fine. I think the main part of this is mostly about what our product is. DuckDuckGo is a search engine, have UI chat. Most of our product, although it seems like it buttons in Chrome, Windows, most of it is actually with text content, like we take search results or take the AI chat with Apple. So around like 80% of product surface that you’re seeing is typography. We spent so much time on like thinking about color, this, that, buttons, styles. I think typography and type setting kind of require that much attention as well because they take like most of your screen when you’re using it. The reason for not using defaults, I think it’s where kind of the brand maturity sort of goes into it’s something we wanna do to kind of associate a kind of a feeling, kind of a look that we want to encode in our brand. I mean, I can go into a lot more detail about this, but just the idea is like, you want to make... Yeah, but like, yeah, the idea is you’re basically kind of creating an ownable sort of like element. I think typography is as important as the blue color that you use and the brand colors that you use and everything else.

Mary: I know you could. I know you could. I think the search engine as a surface is a good point to bring up because, know, obviously, like I mentioned, I work on the brand here at DuckDuckGo. And when you look at the search engine, you’re often questioning, you know, how can I inject more personality? How can I inject more of our, you know, our over our affect into the product and make people know when they look at it that this is DuckDuckGo. This isn’t Google. This isn’t Bing. And there’s really not much you have to work with.

Nirzar: Right.

Mary: Obviously you