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Comment by samsnelling | Hacker News Reader

I will probably get downvoted into oblivion for this... So let me preface by saying that I really like the new design.

At what point do you as a startup justify spending a huge amount of money on a "designer" to tweak a font? Does it look nice? Absolutely.

Would I, as a business owner, pay a lot of money to change one cursive font to a slightly different cursive font? I'm not so sure.

Sub question: What does a design tweak like this cost? From what I've seen, sought after designers can go for some serious $$$.

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A fair question. It's essentially the design equivalent of optimizing your db code: Will your business suffer because you get 8% fewer writes per second than you could with some refactoring? Probably not. But it all adds up to the responsiveness of your web application, and likewise, the easy-to-miss typographic nuances add up to the overall impression of quality of the product.

By the way, to be designer-pedantic... There are actually no fonts involved at all here, as far as I can tell – the original logo appears to have been an original calligraphic piece, and the new one is an iteration on that, further refining its calligraphic form.

So long as we're being pedantic, the original logo used Wendy Std Bold with a slightly modified "C": http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/adobe/wendy-lp/

Wow, I stand corrected. The original logo also has subtle adjustments to one or both of the lower-case 'i' characters to make them each different, which was what threw me off.

Thank you for a great explanation/analogy.

Let us not forget the human. An additional benefit of refactoring is you are going to feel better motivated, which may help you produce better work in next few days. So will anyone maintaining your code in the future, and perhaps the time she would've spend WTFing at previous code, she will spend differently, and more motivated as well.

FWIW When I was a student at the Art Institute of Atlanta, one of my instructors was Aarron Walter (UX Lead at MailChimp). He mentioned they paid John Hicks a flat fee of $50,000 for the logo and the monkey illustration.

For them, building on the emotion and branding of Freddy was not a joke and they wanted something that could be playful while still performing an essential business function.

Agree with the cost or not, it did start an era for them where they've done very well.

I imagine Jessica's fee was not as much as Hicks but not far away either I'm sure.

Well worth it, I'm sure. When choosing between MailChimp and CampaignMonitor for our newsletters (both equally good at the time as far as I could tell), we went with MailChimp simply because we got a kick out of it.

Logos go everywhere so to have something that is really amazing that you use for years; why not spend a few bucks to make it look even better.

It rings true for me too; along the same lines as those that buy an amp to drive $50 phones or buy Dre's Beats. A change in sounds doesn't necessarily mean an improvement. There's a noticeable difference; I paid big bucks; it must be better!

This is not to say the OP is a hack. I appreciated the article and work very much. But as others have shown in this thread, with the right framing, there are flaws in the "improvement!" To me, the article needs patio11 A-B treatment to convince me the masses are giving a crap.

I hope that didn't cost serious $$$. Looks like a freebie font turned into a logo.

That's a cute troll comment. Like when my mom says "aren't all websites the same?"

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