Show how classy your phone app is with REAL fake GOLD text! Gold everywhere = high class operation.

Background:

PayPal recently announced a new font that they are quite proud of, which, according to the designer (https://klim.co.nz/blog/paypal-sans-design-information/), features “understated elegance” and shows the “confidence and foresight to buck the neo-grotesque groupthink of their Silicon Valley brethren.”

Fig 1: Left: PayPal’s new custom font. Right: this approximation in “Hiragino Sans” (a default Mac font) lacks the Skia-esque whimsy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skia_(typeface)) of PayPal’s font.

Since this font is to be used in the PayPal phone app, it was designed “with special consideration for mobile devices.”

Proposal:

However, perhaps this font can still be improved.

To really convey a sense of “money” and “confidence,” a banking font can evoke the idea of gold. Everyone knows: gold = money, so this is a shortcut that brings trust and reliability to the forefront of the user’s mind.

The problem with making a gold-leaf font is that there isn’t just a specific shade of yellow-orange that you can make as a font and have it be “gold.”

Gold requires a specific kind of metallic reflection that can’t be faked with a single color.

gold-side

Fig 2: The “gold text” on this tilted smartphone just looks orange. That won’t do!

Luckily, we can fix this

  • Since this is on a phone, the accelerometers of the phone can be used to figure out how the phone is being held, and then a fake reflection can be generated on the metallic surface of the text.
  • The phone’s front-facing camera could even be used to detect light sources; then the gold could reflect light (and perhaps even the actual room the user is in!) in a convincing manner.

gold-tilt

Fig 3: Now that the phone’s accelerometer is being used, we can have a shiny specular highlight move across the text as the user tilts the phone (note the shine on the right side of this image). Instant gold!

Conclusion:

Only through the use of a gimmicky gold font can a bank (or other financial operation) prove that is a legitimate and venerable institution.

PROS: Brings gravitas to your online bank. And you don’t have to pay a custom font designer.

CONS: May dazzle users with its brilliance. Could induce epilepsy under unusual circumstances.