5 ms·

The problem is licensing, the prices for licensing is just absurd. Like to get a font to use in your app, you need to pay $5,000+ for any decent looking font. A

by usaphp 8y ago

The problem is licensing, the prices for licensing is just absurd. Like to get a font to use in your app, you need to pay $5,000+ for any decent looking font. And if you are trying to design something - good luck downloading a font for a desktop to try it out. I am sure this system can be improved to benefit both font authors and font users

inferiorhuman 8y ago
If you don't like the price feel free to create your own. There are some excellent open source tools available for font creation and manipulation like FontForge. There are also some excellent open source fonts that you can use as a workflow guide. Fonts have historically been expensive because each variant is a significant amount of work, and folks often want ALL THE VARIANTS. You're looking at years for a single variant, and a single family of fonts may be someone's life work. Yes it's non-trivial to create an italic version of a font. Kerning each weight... want fonts optimized for a given size (opticals)? That's a ton more work there too. Of course it costs money. Don't except that a license to redistribute that for a pittance — there's a big difference between a license to create documents that will use a subset of the font and embedding a whole font that your customers could then use for any purpose they see fit essentially bypassing any sort of income. Although I'd argue you'd be best off using system fonts in the vast majority of use cases lest you come off looking like that guy who uses Comic Sans everywhere. That said, while legacy companies have been (and still are) reluctant to embrace newer technology, some are better than others. Most foundaries will let you preview fonts online and offer a wide array of samples to view. Typekit was a great resource where you could license fonts for web use. Of course Adobe bought and mangled the ever living hell out of them. In terms of foundaries, FontShop has been at the forefront of embracing technology (including all the cool things you can do with OpenType) and typically licenses for their excellent FontFont family of fonts are very reasonable. Monotype bought FontShop a few years back so we'll see how long that lasts though. My take on it is that if I'm using something to make money I should pay for it. When I setup my letterhead and business cards I ended up buying licenses for the font variants at around $30-$40 per. It adds up, but it also gets you thinking about whether or not you really need the bold, condensed, italic variant or not. Look -- I had a conversation last night with a friend of mine about the new Nikon mirrorless system. He was a pro photographer for a while. His comments? People don't buy photographs anymore so there's no sense in him investing in a new system. He let the lease run out on the studio this year and bought a boat instead. Here's the key difference between a photographer and a typographer: one finished photo may be the result of a few days or weeks of work[1], one font is going to be an order of magnitude more work. 1: Yes there are ALWAYS exceptions and outliers -- e.g. for the stuff I shoot I spend maybe a few hours in post per shot at the very most and that's pretty extreme for me.
spanktheuser 8y ago
Given that only a few type designers are even prosperous, let alone wealthy, my sense that this is the necessary price. I assume you like you get paid for your labor. Or is it only type designers that should work for free because you have some sort of basic human right to a "decent looking font." > I am sure this system can be improved to benefit both font authors and font users One approach that could work is draconian DRM but no one liked the drawbacks. You must have some idea on how improve the system, since you are so sure it can be improved. I'd suggest you implement this idea - you'll be doing everyone quite the favor and become rather wealthy as a result.
- inferiorhuman 8y ago
  One thing you'll see though is that different use cases trigger different licenses at different price points. Embedding a whole font in an app, for distribution will be eye watteringly expensive. Licensing a font for your site will typically be significantly cheaper. Although there are still plenty of ways to get screwed. For instance, Adobe likes to count cache hits as page views.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  What the parent comment is saying is that many of the people who download these things are designers who have no need for the typeface for personal use but rather for clients who are the end customer. If there is no way for designers to use your typeface free of charge then you can kiss goodbye to any revenue generated through companies who can actually afford the licensing fees and use designers to recommend a typeface.
- wcdolphin 8y ago
  Or alternatively the market is not very efficient. There is zero marginal cost for a font to be used, yet people are currently precluded from using fonts due to price. That seems to suggest there may be an inefficiency, and reducing the price may not only reduce piracy but also increase revenue.
perchard 8y ago
usa PHP, this is false. > Like to get a font to use in your app, you need to pay $5,000+ for any decent looking font. There are many high quality open source fonts available. For example: https://github.com/IBM/plex https://github.com/IBM/plex http://www.latofonts.com/lato-free-fonts/ http://www.latofonts.com/lato-free-fonts/ Many foundries such as Grilli Type have free trials (https://www.grillitype.com/free_trials https://www.grillitype.com/free_trials) and reasonable pricing for very high quality typefaces (https://www.grillitype.com/shops/gt-america https://www.grillitype.com/shops/gt-america <$1k for desktop + web)
- usaphp 8y ago
  Having a couple of free good fonts to select from is not a great solution. Most design studios are using hundreds of fonts to pick a right one for branding. And just so you know - app updates count as new installation in terms of font licensing. So in you example from GT America font, if you have an app that is installed on 5,000 phones (which is quite easily achievable on app store) you will have to pay $245,000 : https://cl.ly/21d48f64f529 https://cl.ly/21d48f64f529 And here is a mobile app licensing terms on fonts.com: > LICENSES FOR MOBILE APPS A mobile app license permits the embedding of a font into the iOS, Android or Windows Phone mobile platforms for a single title and a set number of app installations. You can view and modify the installation limit from the cart. App installations can be spread out across the platforms your app is available for. A new license is not required to cover updates to an app, however installations of newer versions of your app do count toward your installation limit. Learn more about licenses for mobile apps
  - inferiorhuman 8y ago
    The question becomes: why are you embedding an entire font into your mobile app? So you can create one off UI widgets? For corporate branding? While every dev seems to fancy themselves a great designer, the reality is that apps end up looking like they were rejected from MySpace and Geocities for being too ugly. Custom widgets using non-system fonts (much like in the desktop and web sphere) often lose out on important accessibility baubles as well. I can certainly understand a desire for completely custom widgets on something like a full screen game. But to eschew the system fonts? Meh. Meanwhile if your main use is branding you don't need to embed or subset the whole font. Include your logo or whatever as a sprite (vector or bitmap) and get a license for that sort of usage, it's cheaper. If $50/seat is too much, the correct answer isn't "hey let's pirate it for my commercial app".
brownbat 8y ago
> The problem is licensing... It's led to larger tech companies rolling their own, which often means just taking something already out there and changing a few corners slightly and calling it a new work. https://www.arun.is/blog/custom-typefaces/ https://www.arun.is/blog/custom-typefaces/
open-source-ux 8y ago
There are thousands of quality typefaces you can embed in your app at affordable prices. Both myfonts.com and fontspring.com, two of the most popular commercial font sites, offer licences for app embedding. As others have mentioned, there are lots of high quality open source fonts too. For example, Adobe's Source San Pro, designed by Paul D. Hunt, is popular on many websites. It was designed for UIs and comes in a whole range of weights: https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans-pro https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans-pro Another font designed for UI display is Clear Sans commissioned by Intel: https://01.org/clear-sans https://01.org/clear-sans When looking for a font, the quality can vary widely, but the choice is enormous.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

by usaphp 8y ago

inferiorhuman 8y ago

If you don't like the price feel free to create your own. There are some excellent open source tools available for font creation and manipulation like FontForge. There are also some excellent open source fonts that you can use as a workflow guide. Fonts have historically been expensive because each variant is a significant amount of work, and folks often want ALL THE VARIANTS. You're looking at years for a single variant, and a single family of fonts may be someone's life work. Yes it's non-trivial to create an italic version of a font. Kerning each weight... want fonts optimized for a given size (opticals)? That's a ton more work there too. Of course it costs money. Don't except that a license to redistribute that for a pittance — there's a big difference between a license to create documents that will use a subset of the font and embedding a whole font that your customers could then use for any purpose they see fit essentially bypassing any sort of income. Although I'd argue you'd be best off using system fonts in the vast majority of use cases lest you come off looking like that guy who uses Comic Sans everywhere. That said, while legacy companies have been (and still are) reluctant to embrace newer technology, some are better than others. Most foundaries will let you preview fonts online and offer a wide array of samples to view. Typekit was a great resource where you could license fonts for web use. Of course Adobe bought and mangled the ever living hell out of them. In terms of foundaries, FontShop has been at the forefront of embracing technology (including all the cool things you can do with OpenType) and typically licenses for their excellent FontFont family of fonts are very reasonable. Monotype bought FontShop a few years back so we'll see how long that lasts though. My take on it is that if I'm using something to make money I should pay for it. When I setup my letterhead and business cards I ended up buying licenses for the font variants at around $30-$40 per. It adds up, but it also gets you thinking about whether or not you really need the bold, condensed, italic variant or not. Look -- I had a conversation last night with a friend of mine about the new Nikon mirrorless system. He was a pro photographer for a while. His comments? People don't buy photographs anymore so there's no sense in him investing in a new system. He let the lease run out on the studio this year and bought a boat instead. Here's the key difference between a photographer and a typographer: one finished photo may be the result of a few days or weeks of work[1], one font is going to be an order of magnitude more work. 1: Yes there are ALWAYS exceptions and outliers -- e.g. for the stuff I shoot I spend maybe a few hours in post per shot at the very most and that's pretty extreme for me.

spanktheuser 8y ago

Given that only a few type designers are even prosperous, let alone wealthy, my sense that this is the necessary price. I assume you like you get paid for your labor. Or is it only type designers that should work for free because you have some sort of basic human right to a "decent looking font." > I am sure this system can be improved to benefit both font authors and font users One approach that could work is draconian DRM but no one liked the drawbacks. You must have some idea on how improve the system, since you are so sure it can be improved. I'd suggest you implement this idea - you'll be doing everyone quite the favor and become rather wealthy as a result.

inferiorhuman 8y ago
One thing you'll see though is that different use cases trigger different licenses at different price points. Embedding a whole font in an app, for distribution will be eye watteringly expensive. Licensing a font for your site will typically be significantly cheaper. Although there are still plenty of ways to get screwed. For instance, Adobe likes to count cache hits as page views.
mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
What the parent comment is saying is that many of the people who download these things are designers who have no need for the typeface for personal use but rather for clients who are the end customer. If there is no way for designers to use your typeface free of charge then you can kiss goodbye to any revenue generated through companies who can actually afford the licensing fees and use designers to recommend a typeface.
wcdolphin 8y ago
Or alternatively the market is not very efficient. There is zero marginal cost for a font to be used, yet people are currently precluded from using fonts due to price. That seems to suggest there may be an inefficiency, and reducing the price may not only reduce piracy but also increase revenue.

perchard 8y ago

usa PHP, this is false. > Like to get a font to use in your app, you need to pay $5,000+ for any decent looking font. There are many high quality open source fonts available. For example: https://github.com/IBM/plex https://github.com/IBM/plex http://www.latofonts.com/lato-free-fonts/ http://www.latofonts.com/lato-free-fonts/ Many foundries such as Grilli Type have free trials (https://www.grillitype.com/free_trials https://www.grillitype.com/free_trials) and reasonable pricing for very high quality typefaces (https://www.grillitype.com/shops/gt-america https://www.grillitype.com/shops/gt-america <$1k for desktop + web)

usaphp 8y ago
Having a couple of free good fonts to select from is not a great solution. Most design studios are using hundreds of fonts to pick a right one for branding. And just so you know - app updates count as new installation in terms of font licensing. So in you example from GT America font, if you have an app that is installed on 5,000 phones (which is quite easily achievable on app store) you will have to pay $245,000 : https://cl.ly/21d48f64f529 https://cl.ly/21d48f64f529 And here is a mobile app licensing terms on fonts.com: > LICENSES FOR MOBILE APPS A mobile app license permits the embedding of a font into the iOS, Android or Windows Phone mobile platforms for a single title and a set number of app installations. You can view and modify the installation limit from the cart. App installations can be spread out across the platforms your app is available for. A new license is not required to cover updates to an app, however installations of newer versions of your app do count toward your installation limit. Learn more about licenses for mobile apps
- inferiorhuman 8y ago
  The question becomes: why are you embedding an entire font into your mobile app? So you can create one off UI widgets? For corporate branding? While every dev seems to fancy themselves a great designer, the reality is that apps end up looking like they were rejected from MySpace and Geocities for being too ugly. Custom widgets using non-system fonts (much like in the desktop and web sphere) often lose out on important accessibility baubles as well. I can certainly understand a desire for completely custom widgets on something like a full screen game. But to eschew the system fonts? Meh. Meanwhile if your main use is branding you don't need to embed or subset the whole font. Include your logo or whatever as a sprite (vector or bitmap) and get a license for that sort of usage, it's cheaper. If $50/seat is too much, the correct answer isn't "hey let's pirate it for my commercial app".

brownbat 8y ago

> The problem is licensing... It's led to larger tech companies rolling their own, which often means just taking something already out there and changing a few corners slightly and calling it a new work. https://www.arun.is/blog/custom-typefaces/ https://www.arun.is/blog/custom-typefaces/

open-source-ux 8y ago

There are thousands of quality typefaces you can embed in your app at affordable prices. Both myfonts.com and fontspring.com, two of the most popular commercial font sites, offer licences for app embedding. As others have mentioned, there are lots of high quality open source fonts too. For example, Adobe's Source San Pro, designed by Paul D. Hunt, is popular on many websites. It was designed for UIs and comes in a whole range of weights: https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans-pro https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans-pro Another font designed for UI display is Clear Sans commissioned by Intel: https://01.org/clear-sans https://01.org/clear-sans When looking for a font, the quality can vary widely, but the choice is enormous.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]