There can't be that many companies in the world that have a dedicated typographer, but Spotify is one of them. I was lucky enough to meet Bianca Berning, Spotify's staff typographer at Frontify's conference, Paradigms, in Morocco recently, when we caught up after her talk.
We spoke about everything from her first steps in typography to adapting type for different cultures and her advice for budding type designers.
Bianca is a designer specialising in typography, type design, and type technology. Currently, she is a staff typographer working on Encore, Spotify’s design system, where she drives innovation in typography in cross-platform product experiences. Before joining Spotify, Bianca led creative direction on brand typefaces and complex type systems for global companies like Amazon, BBC, FedEx, Indeed, and Google while at Dalton Maag.
How did you get into typography?
I did my communication design degree in Germany, with a focus on typography. Back then, it was just about text layout for print. I made this big newspaper as part of my dissertation, and I struggled with the type. I was trying to pick a font that would work for my project, and I reached out to foundries and was just like, ‘can I use this in my dissertation’? Lots of foundries are cool about these sorts of requests.
But the one that I really, really wanted, they came back and said, ‘No, you really gotta pay a full licence’. I was just like, ‘okay, I will pay the license, but can I modify some of the letters in order to make it suit my project even better?'. And they shut me down.
That intrigued me. It made me want to understand how type is made. So I went to the UK after my dissertation, and I did my Master's in typeface design. The intention was always to go back to graphic design and just be that person who knows a little bit more about type design. I never made my way back. I got sucked in. I joined Dalton Maag right out of university, and stayed there for over a decade, making brand typefaces for lots of big companies, and then I ended up with Spotify looking at the same sort of things, but from the other side.
How important is type to Spotify?
Important enough to hire a typographer. I know that the team behind Spotify’s design system, Encore, cares loads. For most companies, typography is a side project. So typically, design systems designers or product designers who know a little bit about typography would tackle typographic bugs on the side. Their day job is building UIs, so if a bug pops up, they fix it as best as they can or reach out to an external foundry to handle it.
At Spotify, they realised that typography shouldn't be a side project
And I think at Spotify, they realised that it shouldn't be a side project in maintenance mode. Text is everywhere and it’s important enough to get someone in that can do all of this maintenance, all of the bug fixing stuff, but also look into innovation. Someone who can look at how we can use type in the product a little bit more intentionally? How can we be a little bit more outstanding? How can we be brilliant at typography?
My line manager, Juli Sombat, was the one that made the case for my position. It didn’t exist before 2022 when I arrived.. And she and her manager are very, very well educated in typography, and so far they haven’t regretted hiring a typographer, as far as I know. I think there's an appreciation for this level of typographic care in different pockets within Spotify, but specifically in the UI part.
How do you make sure that the type that you use is culturally relevant?
We’ve got a lot going on. We are in 192 markets, and we localise the product in 74 languages. And most of those languages are now covered by our custom fonts that we rolled out last year.
That was a massive collaboration between different teams within Spotify and an external type foundry, Dinamo. We all came together and worked out a brief that we felt hit the spot and reflected the vibrancy and creativity of the Spotify community. And we will continue to put this level of care into every language and every script we support.
Has AI changed the way that you work?
It’s helped a little bit, but mostly in the background.
Working with type and typography in the kind of context that I'm working in, it made some of my processes a lot easier. So as an example, when we update a font, it's more often than not because we found a bug in the font. Imagine we found that our lowercase ‘i’ is missing its tittle and we make an update to the font and want to roll it out, there's this whole process that I go through in order to make sure that the only change that we make to the font is the one that was intended and we don’t break anything else. That used to be quite a manual process.
I am not a programmer or developer at all, but AI helped me build a tool where I can pull in the old font and the new one and it does most of the work for me. I get a visual comparison, I get overlays, and then I get a technical side by side that says, ‘these things changed in the new file. Did you mean to do this?'
It's more like the background processes, the tedious tasks, that I'm trying to use AI for
This tool is a WIP but it already not only speeds up my own processes, but it’s also intended to assist my colleagues if I'm ever away for a longer time and they might need to pick up my work. None of them necessarily have my level of experience in type or working with fonts.
So for their benefit, I hooked it up with ChatGPT, and prompted it to explain in plain language what those changes are so they can make a judgment on whether that was intended or not without having to read a ton of really wordy specifications about font formats. So it's more like the background processes, the tedious tasks, that I'm trying to use AI for, and in this case, it helped me both build the tool, and I use it to give more context to the findings in case somebody else needs to use it.
Do you have a favorite font?
I get this question a lot. I like a font with a purpose. Times New Roman is a good example, it was designed for newspaper design, and I think it works brilliantly in newspaper print but feels utterly out of place nearly everywhere else. I appreciate the thought that went into it and the design decisions that they made in order to particularly suit newspaper print.
What advice would you give to those who want to get into type?
Go out and look at as many things as possible. Even if they’re not related to type at all. I feel like I get my biggest inspiration just being out and about looking at signs on buildings, or absorbing different cultures.
You need to absorb as many things as possible
Morocco is just so visually inspiring to me, because I see stuff that I don't see if I walk around London, for example, and I think that is a lot more important than just sitting in front of your computer trying to reinvent the wheel.
You need to let things sink in and absorb as many different things as possible. That’s what leads to a lot more innovation in type than another reinvention of Helvetica.
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