It had less of the original logo’s unpolished charm (which can either be good or bad), but it gained a slightly more energetic feel. It was an uncomfortable mismatch between two typefaces that looked sort-of similar, but not quite.Īn exploration to give Museo the same visual treatment as the Gotham logo turned out surprisingly well.

What did not work was the combination of Museo and the logo, set in Gotham. This typeface worked great in the UI, with solid legibility at small sizes. That’s when Museo Sans Rounded came onto my radar.

Unfortunately, our time ran out and we went scouting for alternatives. The idea of their carefully crafted work being mutilated by bad rendering on lo-res screens wasn’t acceptable, leading them to build an advanced system that would serve specially tailored versions of their fonts, depending on the intended rendering size.įor months I made a habit refreshing the browser tab that promised to announce their forthcoming service at least once a day. While many foundries at the time were partnering up with services like Typekit and Fontdeck to make their fonts available for the web, one particular foundry stood out by holding out: Hoeﬂer & Frere-Jones (now Hoefler&Co), makers of the Gotham typeface. These technical changes would be accompanied by a revised premium plan (WeTransfer Plus) that demanded a redesign of the website. A catalyst for the latter was the typeface selected by WeTransfer and its design partner at the time, Dolly Rogers.īut by late 2011, the Flash-based website wasn’t sustainable anymore, and preparations started for a move towards html on a Ruby back-end. Two key factors in our success have been the product’s ease-of-use and aesthetic appeal. WeTransfer has never been about making something just ‘decent’. Hacking your way to something decent was just part of the job. In the 2000’s, I’d usually find myself settling for Verdana or Georgia, and trying to get at least some headlines set in a non-standard typeface, by using sIFR, and later Cufón. When I wrote my master’s thesis on the shitty state of text legibility on screens in 1999, I wouldn’t have guessed that it would take as long as it did to have webfonts available to anyone. Something that vexed me for well over a decade. In a time before WOFF, Typekit, and Google Fonts, this was pretty much the only way to have proper control over typography on websites. Yet I think we probably wouldn’t be transferring over one billion files for 40 million users this month if it wasn’t for this infamous browser plug-in. Five months before Steve Jobs published his “ Thoughts on Flash”, WeTransfer launched its first website– built with Flash.

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