Genius.com
The road for Genius.com (previously Rap Genius) has been rocky. A startup centered around annotating lyrics, they’ve been struggling with bro culture and their graphic identity for years. Kanye West even tried his hand at a redesign.
“He never actually completed it. If he had, that would have definitely been the new design of Rap Genius.”
The lackluster logo from an otherwise groundbreaking Kokoro & Moi tells of good intentions but falls short.
In moving from rapgenius.com to simply genius.com, they wisely replaced Verdana with Whitney for body copy, but the pairing with headline typeface DIN felt off. August 2015 brought the latest redesign. DIN was replaced by Programme, whose versatility shines. The humanistic forms in Whitney and Programme keep continuity. Programme’s dimensions prove it to be perfect for metadata, while careful use of bold stylistic sets hint at formulae in line with the site’s namesake.
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Lyrics site Genius Media accuses Google of lifting its contents. Genius claims it can prove lyrics from its site are appearing in Google search information panels – by examining the apostrophes. From the Wall Street Journal:
Here’s what the two glyphs that were used for the typographical watermarking system look like in the Programme typeface: