LFT Etica: Voice of meaning

Words have meaning; they also carry a tone. No one knows better how to distinguish between connotation and denotation than dictionary.com, the foremost online resource for words and their meanings. Joined by its sister website, thesaurus.com, the two provide a command of the English language that inspires confidence and learning, depth and insight.

When a website is all about words, those words should have several properties: they should be readable, distinct, and attactive but not overwhelming. To facilitate a clear hierarchy, quick gathering of information, and easily-read text, dictionary.com and thesaurus.com chose Leftloft’s full Etica family for their rebrand. Besides the hierarchy and readability advantages, the Etica family imparts a sense of joy while reading. George Frederick explains more in this interview.

TypeTogether: Give us some background for dictionary.com. Can you tell us how many visitors use the website per month and how many entries are in the database?

George Frederick: Dictionary.com and its sibling, thesaurus.com, are household names. Since they launched as the first fully digital dictionary and thesaurus in 1995, they have accumulated a massive, loyal audience and a lot of words:
40 million unique visitors per month in the United States
An additional six million visitors per month worldwide
Two million newsletter subscribers
Roughly two million followers on social media
250,000 definitions in the database, plus 1.4 million synonyms

TT: What are users looking for from dictionary.com, and how did that translate into your design brief?
GF: Dictionary.com has a fantastic audience that basically breaks down into two types of people. The first are utility seekers. They look up definitions, synonyms, example sentences, and word origins. They have tasks to complete, jobs to do, homework to finish, and questions to answer — quickly. The second are language lovers. This core audience returns to dictionary.com regularly for the love of words and language. This is their space to enjoy the dictionary experience, to explore, celebrate words, and fulfill curiosity.

Addressing the needs of these two groups was challenging for our typeface selection, but less so for our redesigns. Our design strategies clarified as we worked through segments of our redesign. For example, we approached our homepage design as a digital abiding place for language lovers, a place to return and discover new material every day. This was a dramatic change of direction from the previous homepage design. Our definition and synonym pages were built for the utility seekers and involved a fascinating deep dive into lexicographic structure and design patterns. Uninformed innovation here could have introduced major usability issues.

Our redesign team — including representatives from design, product, and engineering — partnered closely with editors and lexicographers from our smart and talented content team to understand how design and typography could elevate and enrich the user experiences.

TT: Why did you choose TypeTogether’s LFT Etica and LFT Etica Sheriff families?
GF: Are you sitting comfortably? Because I could go on for a long time answering this question, but I’ll try to be succinct.

We were under a tight deadline for choosing new typefaces, with redesign, brand refresh, and design system projects beginning simultaneously. Plus, we were in the middle of a sitewide code refactor. We didn’t have the advantage of addressing these projects sequentially, so it didn’t matter if there was a more perfect way. We weren’t going to squander the rare opportunity to align our content, code, and design from a fresh start.

With everything swirling around us, we dedicated the proper time and focus to our typeface selection process. Our team set the parameters and decision-making chronology this way:

1. Established criteria:
- Readability
- Flexible family
- Balance of tone for our two audience types
- Inclusivity
- Technical integrity
- Great foundry/partner: easy to work with, responsive, helpful
- Cost: you get what you pay for, and free fonts are rarely best when they cost more in frustration, poor functionality, and lack of support

2. Facilitated typeface nominations
3. Narrowed our list to five finalists
4. Tested the finalist typefaces with users to evaluate readability and brand attribute alignment
5. Acquired test versions of the finalists and test-drove them to evaluate technical integrity and try the fonts in various use cases
6. Selected our winners: LFT Etica Sheriff and LFT Etica
7. Implemented our new fonts just in time to put them to work in our various projects

I’ll say a few more things. Typeface choice had a clear effect on readability, perception, and emotional engagement with the article experience. Etica Sheriff was the top performer in readability and look-and-feel, with Etica as the runner-up. But Etica came out on top in overall satisfaction and first impression, narrowly edging out Etica Sheriff. Of the two, Etica Sheriff had the greatest alignment with our brand attributes. The second thing is that the next-level quality of the typefaces plus the value of TypeTogether’s partnership are well worth the cost.

If you’d like more detail about the selection process, here is an article I wrote about it. (And my website also uses TypeTogether’s Portada for all text.)

TT: The new typographic palette looks and performs very well on the website, so is there a reason it didn’t make it into the mobile app?
GF: Time. We were operating at such a fast pace in MVP mode, overhauling our web products almost exclusively while I was at dictionary.com. We also implemented Etica Sheriff and Etica into our newsletter design and social media assets.

Despite the scale of the brand, our team at dictionary.com was relatively small so prioritisation was critical. We just never got time to overhaul the mobile apps.

The company was sold in April of 2024, and the redesign halted. Sadly, I won’t be able to bring Etica Sheriff and Etica into the apps, nor will I be able to update and modify the MVP web implementations. I still lose sleep over the relative type scales, various spacings on the homepage, and the new article design we left in the hopper. But I’m proud of the massive directional change we were able to accomplish. We left the new owners with great typefaces and a solid foundation upon which to build.

TT: Thank you for your time and for quickly summarizing such extensive work. It’s great to see our typefaces being used to enthusiastically celebrate words and language.
GF: You’re welcome! Thanks for allowing me to discuss the project.

The voice of meaning
Finding just the right word for a given situation can sometimes be difficult, especially when a modern connotation diverges from its historical denotation. That’s when dictionaries are helpful. The process undertaken for the dictionary.com and thesaurus.com overhaul was extensive, detailed, and eventually a success for language lovers and utility seekers alike. We are proud to see LFT Etica and Etica Sheriff, the charming and balanced duo for any application, used as the voice of meaning in this solid rebrand.