[ken]

You can tell how old a car is by the extra words on the back under the name. "Fuel injected"? 1980's or 1990's. "Hybrid"? 2000's or 2010's.

Similarly, you can tell the era of computer software by what strange thing they decide they need to customize. We're in the era of "slight variants of Helvetica". (Nobody's asking for a Zapfino clone, strangely.) For whatever reason, fonts and logotypes are the axis on which everybody seems to need to compete today. And gratuitous 2D animation.

We already went through the "custom sound" phase, and it (mostly) went out of style, thankfully. Splash screens are also on the way out, since we no longer need a way to hide long loading times.

I wonder what's next. Gratuitous 3D animation? Custom smells? Plaids?

To be clear, I have no problem with nice fonts on my computer, but I think it's funny that everyone is so focused on showing off their creativity on this one very specific axis. You really can't think of any other possible ways to have functional style?

[freehunter]

Personally I think the problem is the over-use of analytics in page design. No one can compete on page design anymore because it doesn't convert well with focus groups or in A/B testing, so every page looks like a Bootstrap template. So they try to find SOMETHING that won't put up lower conversion numbers yet is slightly different so they can say their page is unique.

[ken]

Good point. It's probably a design focus of companies because it's named, and self-contained. You can put "Font" on a schedule, and a budget, and an A/B test. Your programmers can't really complain that it makes any other task more complex. It's the holy grail of design: some pixie dust you can sprinkle on at the end, which impacts nothing but makes everything prettier.

If, say, physics-engine-based layouts became popular for general user interfaces, it would take over the entire development of the product. It would affect every part of the budget and schedule and architecture. You couldn't feasibly A/B test it.

[erikpukinskis]

Custom fonts are generally bad for conversion too.