🦆 Interaction Nerds by UXA
This week from Archive & Collection: Why all companies are changing their logos to sans-serif, and select by font plugin on Figma
👋 Announcements — Entering the World of Fonts and Upcoming Figma Talk
Happy first day of school and welcome to our first issue of the semester!! In our next two issues of A&C, we will be exploring the world of font faces, how they contribute to design, and how they affect us as the audience. 👀
In addition, we’re kicking off this semester with an event in collaboration with Figma! As we are still finalizing our topics and event agenda, we would love to hear your input through this interest form—it would greatly help us to host something that gauges your interest and cater to your goals! 🤓
☘️ Industry — Brand Logos and the Sans Serif Invasion
Let’s take a look at this image below:
They all look pretty similar, don’t they? These are the logo comparisons of different companies between 2017 and now, and there is a pretty clear sans serif typeface preference throughout.
So what made all these companies, different in service, industries and fields, all turn their logos into sans serif? This article talks a bit about the potential reasons, along with how our perception of a “brand” has evolved in the past 20 years.
As a personal note, with most of the websites we’ve checked out through product hunt, almost all of them chose Inter as their go-to font, as it’s bland yet elegant. If you want to try out new types of fonts for your web project, this twitter thread might provide some helpful selections of fonts that you can use 🙂.
🌾 Skill — Select by Font Plug-in on Figma
Here is a situation that our editor Sean often encounters:
As he was finishing up his design, he realized the subtitle is way too small compared to the rest of the font style, and it would be great if he could change all of them at once.
Figma does have a plug-in just for that—the Select by Font plug-in allows you to select individual fonts in the current selections and make adjustments to all through a single click!
🙋 One Question for You
Our editor Sean complained that his eating schedule had been a bit messed up, as he was a bit busy moving into the new apartment this week. Realizing that during the semester we would have even less time to focus on food, we are curious…
What do you usually have when you don't have time to cook (Hunan Express? Chipotle?)
Last week’s question:
What was your most unexpected purchase?
Sean: So I was at IKEA last week and got a wooden hand, turns out to be a pretty good airpod holder lol.
Rebecca: I bought a ticket for the online concert of my favorite k-pop group at 2am so I’d say it was an unexpected (and irrational) purchase and the concert actually will be at 6am EST, but I still look forward to the concert regardless!
As always, you can reply directly to this Substack email, share your response through this form, or send it to yizes@andrew.cmu.edu
🤔 Who’s behind the scenes?
Thanks for reading this week’s Interaction Nerds by CMU UXA! The editors behind this work are Sean Shen and Rebecca Jiang.
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