Airbnb Bespoke Typeface ‘Cereal’

Airbnb, the pioneer of the vacation rental sharing economy, launched last May its own bespoke typeface ‘Cereal’ designed by the international independent type design studio, Dalton Maag.

Derek Chan (Creative Lead, Marketing) and Karri Saarinen (Design Lead, Design Language Systems) mentioned that the reason behind the creation of a custom-made typeface were specific business needs around brand distinction, legibility, and scalability, that no available typefaces were addressing.

They also commented that Airbnb needed a typeface that would reflect the brand personality and function online and offline, as the brand’s work is extremely typographic and lives across multiple media including the app, Airbnbmag, billboards, web, iOS, and Android.

“As a company that’s designing online and offline experiences, we saw a clear opportunity to create a distinct typeface that can carry the weight of both—to leap off the screen to a magazine.”

Airbnb Cereal microsite 

As mentioned before, the typeface is named ‘Cereal’, and even though the name might seem confusing to some people, there is a reason behind it. Derek Chan mentions that the name was chosen because it is a memory of when breakfast was a part of the company’s name and also of the time when the founders shipped Airbnb hosts free boxes of cereal—Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain’s— to save the company from a $20,000 credit card debt.

Type can get pretty small in UI design, and if the weight is too light the type can almost completely disappear. So we paid special attention to the balance of the Book weight as to not be too light or too heavy.

Karri Saarinen

The typeface was designed for a fully functional and enjoyable reading experience in any size and media, therefore, it comes in 6 different weights, and has open apertures and an increased x-height which makes the lowercase characters easier to read.

Airbnb ‘Cereal’ currently supports Latin languages and seven non-Latin based languages, however it is intended to be adapted to different script languages including Chinese, Japanese, Devanagari, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Greek, and Thai.

Overall, the typography is very similar to ‘Circular’, which was the one they were previously using. The good thing is that even though it is really similar to ‘Circular’, Airbnb now has its own typeface that nobody else can use since it is not available for purchase or download. For me this seems like a luxury they could afford.

But well… at least this is my F opinion