In my opinion the "typography guys" don't have an especially stronger "voice" than anyone else. They just do a job once, get paid some (relatively small) amount for it, and then move on to the next project. At the biggest these projects involve a few people working for a year or two. Their entire job is about communication, sales, and sweating small design details, so it's no wonder they do a relatively good job at those.
The amount of work those "20 year old SQL schemas" take, once you include every bit of other comparable detail across a whole organization, is (at least) thousands of times bigger and more complicated. Overall the "code guys" have much more resources spent, spend a lot more time, and everyone ultimately cares a lot more about their output. They are large teams of either long-term employees or long-term contractors, whose work never really ends.
In short: Code is a sprawling mess rather than a cutely packaged self-contained thing. Unsurprisingly it's harder to make sense of at a glance.
Backend people accomplish work by making systems work.
For that reason you’ve seen many fonts and many working websites, but not as many people showing how they created a font or made their website work.
We spend a lot more time reading body text than scrolling through menus or fiddling with radiobuttons.
Also, this comment is especially ironic on HN where the top 10 comments on every Show HN submission will be nitpicking about the design of the website or the wording used, etc.
The frontend design team naturally puts more effort into the clarity and visual design of their design documents than the backend engineers do. This shouldn't be surprising.
The people who design interfaces and the people who do branding and identity work are rarely the same people. I've done both (and was developer all over the stack for a decade,) but never at the same time. Branding and identity work is usually done by specialized agencies, and they're usually the ones who make decisions about the type stack.
What you and most other developers don't realize is that these things do actually matter— just not in ways that non-designers consciously pick up on. When looking at an individual website, most folks might not see much difference between a poorly kerned system font and a really expensive 'pro' font painstakingly hand kerned over months or years. However, when people are encountering a brand on a whole, having a uniform, polished look across media dramatically affects how it comes across, and that is hugely consequential. Think about how differently car dealership websites land than car manufacturer websites? And they're selling literally the same fucking product! A knowledgeable designer could write an essay on the difference in the two designs while a layperson would likely shrug and say "it looks... smoother I guess?"
It's really no different than performance for developers. Most people don't consciously notice the difference between a website that's really really streamlined and optimized and one that's just kind of okay... But the meh site will not inspire positive feelings about the experience. If your competitors do better, you likely won't be the one getting their business even if the customer didn't consciously reject your business because of it.
Generalizations like this are just so bad. My biggest beef with design/"product" folk in the tech world is this thing that they do, where they justify their existence as a group of people and a business function by bad-mouthing developers.
> this thing that many of them do
Lol. You can't just qualify a generalization with "many" to make it a non-generalization.
Before getting into design, I was a full-time back end developer for 11 years and worked in dev organizations in ops/support rules for a decade before that. The job market over the past decade had coddled developers so much, and made them so fragile and arrogant. Even intimating that my professional opinion on design is more informed than a developer's opinion on design often yields a intellectual temper tantrum.
For example this page. First thing you see is a hero image showing their font in use. It's a pretty important element, first thing you see and takes up the whole screen. It's blurry and pixelated. Not the worst I've seen but definitely gives me more car dealership not car manufacturer vibes. It's a 1.3MB png that looks just as good converted to an 80KB jpeg and imo even better as a 20KB avif. If it was instead a 1.3MB jpeg or avif starting from a high quality source that thing would look crisp and super car manufacturery.
They've also go a section in the page where the text goes blurry because they've included a table as an image. Or I should rather say it's both blurry and an image because they could have just included a higher res image of the table. They have plenty of other images where it looks fine on there. Again something that gives me car dealership vibes. Actually I would say blurry text image table is specifically a dodgy second hand car dealership level of vibe.
Now you could say that the typography page isn't user or customer facing so its not that important but I see plenty of shitty blurry images on otherwise polished looking pages all over the internet, and also if they covered images in their design system like they do typography then it wouldn't matter. They'd just be in the habit of only using high quality images and have some process in place to deliver them in appropriate formats.
So while backend vs frontend or functionality vs polish are imo boring and played out webdev topics, I am super curious as to why they care enough about inspiring positive feelings to make an entire custom font, have a page of guidelines on how to use said font, but dont have the same for images. And why I see this contrast enough to consider it reasonably common in the industry.
Good one, but that's not my point just to be clear! I think this kind of documentation tends to happen in organisations that already spend so much on enterprise licences that a team of designers doing "graphical profile" work for a year is almost a rounding error, and I don't mind that it happens at all. It's just weird that it happens to such an extent around typefaces, of all things.
Large corps pay dearly for Dell servers, kubernetes solutions from IBM, even the HR-systems are shoved to the cloud. Fortunes can be saved doing those things in-house, but the thing that happens in-house is - replacing Arial with something that looks almost like Arial.
Isn't that a litte weird? (Even if it is also wonderful) :)
And because they like to nerd out so much about it, they put more effort into it.
Brand guidelines tend to seem expansive because they have to break things down in a way that's very easy for all sorts of people to adopt with minimal hassle. From what I've seen, the moment that process gets anywhere within a thousand miles of difficult, people will say "forget it" and do what they want.
Despite all that, branding doesn't really require much in the way of ongoing resource commitments from an organization. They get put together when the brand is updated, and more often than not, the entire process is often outsourced to agencies. Either way, once it's done, it's done for a while.
It's also often publicly available. You can find brand guides for all sorts of companies and organizations available online. Technical documentation is almost always internal, unless we're talking about stuff that's been open-sourced, API documentation, etc. It's also ongoing and is in constant need of updating as code gets updated. As a result, there's no need to pretty it up beyond whatever makes it accessible to your developers. The priority is on keeping it updated as best you can, within the limits of available resources. That doesn't always happen, of course.
Different audiences merit different approaches, and because one is more visible, it may give the false impression that it's of higher importance to an organization.
Many companies have these style guides around typography. Beautiful, thoughtful, very well made things for sure, yet when some backend dev makes a typo so the custom font drops to arial or whatever, it can be days before someone notices and the ones who notice are the font nerds from marketing. Nobody else seems to mind much.
Compare that with what happens if someone misunderstands the 20 year old SQL schema and writes the wrong magic string to a table. Instant crash, everybody notices immediately. Yet database schemas for internal applications tend not to be documented in Porsche-brochure-like sites like this Sweden Sans is.
How did the typography guys get a voice so strong? Note that I don't mind it, I like to see well made things in general, but it's puzzling. It's like there is a secret society of typography nerds that have spread to all major organisations.
>Might I also remind you, the point of the entire backend of an app is to serve the front end. An app with amazing backend practices but fails at matching designs or specs is just a failure and is noticeable by customers.
Just checked my notes and it turns out that frontend is just a temporary fashion-dictated skin over the actually important features of the backend! ;-)