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Oliver Schöndörfer

Things Oliver Says on Podcasts

“I'm saving so much time. I'm doing so much more projects, but I'm feeling still like not being enough, even though I'm more productive than ever. It feels to me like I try to out-compete the machine. And that's not a good place to be at.” — Oliver Schöndörfer, Honest UX Talks “When you're using Claude, it has the serif font and ChatGPT hasn't. And Claude, with this beige background and everything, wants you to feel like, okay, I'm still a human, but a bit warmer. … And ChatGPT is very clean, very rational, very sober.” — Oliver Schöndörfer, Honest UX Talks “Before, it showed that you cared to use the right punctuation marks, to make cool hover effects. It showed that you cared, to have cool illustrations. And now it does the exact opposite. It shows that you didn't care.” — Oliver Schöndörfer, Honest UX Talks

Where to Find Them

Oliver Schöndörfer has been a guest on Honest UX Talks .

Recently: “#183 Typography is a design system infrastructure that nobody budgets for w/Oliver Schöndörfer” on Honest UX Talks (November 2026).

What They Said

“I'm saving so much time. I'm doing so much more projects, but I'm feeling still like not being enough, even though I'm more productive than ever. It feels to me like I try to out-compete the machine. And that's not a good place to be at.” — Oliver Schöndörfer, Honest UX Talks

Schöndörfer had just described doing an audit without AI and being asked afterwards which AI tools he used. He says the speed gains from AI come with a constant feeling of falling behind.

Honest UX Talks · 2026-11-11 Permalink → Listen →
Honest UX Talks Around 43:48 into the episode
Oliver Schöndörfer

I don't know what the question was. I got taken away.

Anfisa Bogomolova

…good first draft and tweak it a little bit on top of it. But I think the draft is not the right thing to do anymore. And it's for everything, not only typography, but just generally speaking, right? It's a whole paradigm change with the content, with the UI, with the imaginary and stuff like that.

Oliver Schöndörfer

Yeah, basically everything is a draft right now or good enough now. Or better than it's complicated. And I also don't know where we will end up with this because in a way, maybe it's also just me. I turned 40 this year, so I'm just feeling old now. And I don't know. And I gave a talk about the optimizations for the city of Vienna, the typography optimizations, and somebody came up to me and asked me, what AI tools did you use during your project? And I was like, I felt in a way bad at the moment because I felt like, oh my God, I'm so old. And I didn't use AI tools to do this. I used AI tools to summarize the findings of my audit and my recommendations. That's what I used it for. I didn't use it to give me suggestions how to change it. I went just through these screens I audited and then I made my comments and remarks and recommendations. And I just did it by looking at it and thinking about it. And I didn't say, yeah, I look at this and this is the markdown file that you have to. That's the problem that I feel like.…

Anfisa Bogomolova

Yeah, absolutely. And it touches a little bit on the thing we discussed just before we started the recording. By the way, before I go into this, when you were saying you were not using AI for your presentation, I just, you know, we, in my job, when we started doing everything with AI, now we don't…

Oliver Schöndörfer

Yeah, it's also about just delivering, delivering. It's just build, deliver, build, deliver, build, deliver. It's not like think about stuff. And the thinking is in the building. And I don't fully agree with that. And I understand why there was a talk by someone from Anthropic who did cloud design.…

Anfisa Bogomolova

Yeah, makes sense. The human part in it. Because it takes a human to notice, to be able to process this, to understand it, and to be able to communicate it and even convince somebody that it's important. And again, that's only human that can do this. AI cannot convince me that typography is…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“When you're using Claude, it has the serif font and ChatGPT hasn't. And Claude, with this beige background and everything, wants you to feel like, okay, I'm still a human, but a bit warmer. … And ChatGPT is very clean, very rational, very sober.” — Oliver Schöndörfer, Honest UX Talks

Making the case that typefaces carry atmosphere even in product interfaces, the typography consultant uses the two best-known chatbot apps as examples of type setting a mood.

Honest UX Talks · 2026-11-11 Permalink → Listen →
Honest UX Talks Around 18:46 into the episode
Oliver Schöndörfer

…is like the infrastructure of your design system because everything is based upon text i guess it's it's not just the video component and an icon it's just always text and if you change this it trickles down everywhere so it can destroy everything but it also can make everything work better

Anfisa Bogomolova

…on but i feel like this is more of a case for marketing design for growth design maybe for things that are more b2c related and more like a commerce right it's a good example have you seen this also happening in a product or is it actually true my assumption that it's more you know marketing thing

Oliver Schöndörfer

…also share the atmosphere. Even see it with the eye. I mean, come on, when you're using Claude, it has the serif font and ChatGPT hasn't. And Claude, of course, wants to, with this beige background and everything, it wants you to feel like, okay, I'm still a human. I'm a human, but a bit warmer. But you feel this. It wants to feel a bit warmer. The sans serif is a bit fuzzier, a bit funkier. And ChatGPT is very clean, very rational, very sober. They tried to work against this lately with this, but you feel like, especially there, there's a reason for that where they use the serif typeface for the output. The information feels like more authoritative or like institutional. It's correct. It's like, it feels different, doesn't it?

Anfisa Bogomolova

Yeah, 100%. I don't know a lot about typography, but one thing I know is how it really conveys the personality. And that's, I think, it's the first role of the typography is to tell me who you are. Like it's a visual communication. Like if I don't know you, I see the product. It's like, you know…

Oliver Schöndörfer

we're talking about wine.

Anfisa Bogomolova

Exactly. You give me a topic. Oh,

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“Before, it showed that you cared to use the right punctuation marks, to make cool hover effects. It showed that you cared, to have cool illustrations. And now it does the exact opposite. It shows that you didn't care.” — Oliver Schöndörfer, Honest UX Talks

Asked how AI affects typographic choices, Schöndörfer talks about the em dash now being read as a sign of AI-written text. He widens it: polish used to signal effort, and now it can signal the reverse.

Honest UX Talks · 2026-11-11 Permalink → Listen →
Honest UX Talks Around 37:32 into the episode
Oliver Schöndörfer

…I've learned about the Khrushchev, the Harche, and all these lovely, wonderful diacritics. But it is like just you have to make it work in that language, obviously. But there are so many beautiful typefaces that support all these diacritics. Why don't you make use of them? So it's like, yeah.

Anfisa Bogomolova

…make it slightly different or you do it yourself or you just pick from whatever AI is producing to you. How do you feel like AI is playing a role, especially to those designers who are not trained to understand the typographic choices today? Like what's the consequences and what we can do better?

Oliver Schöndörfer

Yeah, so we already talked about inter and inter is obviously was the most popular font even before all these agentic web designs or this generated AI stuff. It was already very popular back then and of course the thing that it is trained on is like these and there are several layers to that because when it comes to the font choice you can see it because it uses always free fonts. Why? Because of licensing. So I'm sure a monotype, monopoly type I'm calling them, like my fonts and all this, they invest in a way that they somehow are picked there because right now they're just left out because nobody cares because everything gets generated from Google fonts and because they're easy to fork and to use, which makes sense because of licensing. But the part of paid fonts is getting less and less relevant in a way. And everybody's using the same free fonts that everybody else is using. Then you have some interesting combinations. It loves to combine a very narrow italic with a bold sensor for headings. And…

Anfisa Bogomolova

100%.

Oliver Schöndörfer

I don't know what the question was. I got taken away.

Anfisa Bogomolova

No, but I mean, you capture a great answer. I was more focusing on where do we go from here, right? Like as designers, in terms of AI-generated typography, like I, as a designer, just to make it a bit more practical, I don't really want to, you know, take existing AI-generated, let's say, website…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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