6 ms·
I used to be on the side of fontographers before webfonts became a thing. Want to use a particular font for your print/screen production? Just pay for a licens
by OzzyB 7y ago
I used to be on the side of fontographers before webfonts became a thing.
Want to use a particular font for your print/screen production? Just pay for a license fee -- sure you might have to pay per weight, style, or even seat -- but at least you got to use it for your graphical productions as much as you wanted.
Enter webfonts and instead of letting those same bought license "rollover" to the new medium they created a new separate "web licence" (ok, I can pay another fee); but then some smarty pants thought it would be a good idea to charge per usage (0-50K monthly pageviews $price, 50k-100k another price etc), good grief.
Of course not all foundries do this, but this move spawned the rise of many open source fonts with free and open licenses (and initiatives like Google Fonts) so we could have an open web without another copyright license to worry about.
In other news, I just found out that Variable Fonts[1] are the thing, good times.
[1] https://rsms.me/inter/#variable https://rsms.me/inter/#variable
- tptacek 7y agoI'm not sure I understand the logic here. Webfonts are a thing now, which makes all kinds of fonts, both free and expensive, available for websites. How is that anything but a good thing? Of all the things that message board copyright activists get up-in-arms about, it's hard to imagine one where they have a weaker case than typefaces. Literally nobody needs an expensive typeface; we have more high-quality free typefaces now than anyone has had... basically in all of human history.
- OzzyB 7y agoThe point is simply that if I wanted to create a website and use Circular [0] (a nice geometric font made popular by Spotify) I would need to pay based on total pageviews which is an unknown, so the price is unknown, which is prohibitive in the sense that I'm now tied to a font license that penalizes me based on the success of my website. Or, I could use Inter which is similar, free, better (more weights, filetype options) and I don't have to worry. This goes beyond price, I really don't want another thing to worry about and a cool font isn't worth the monkey on my back. > we have more free typefaces than ever... That's kinda the point I'm making I guess; I believe the recent rise of all these free/open alternatives to popular established ones was precisely because of the webfont-pay-per-pageviews model. [0] https://lineto.com/typefaces/circular https://lineto.com/typefaces/circular
- snazz 7y agoI get your point, but I don’t think Inter is similar enough to Circular to be a replacement for it. Inter is more of a San Francisco replacement in my book (which is how I use it on one of my websites—SF for Apple devices and Inter as a fallback). They’re both pretty, but Spotify’s UI looks very different than a UI set in Inter.
- tptacek 7y agoWe may just be saying the same thing. I think all I'm saying is that there doesn't seem to be anything problematic about the arrangement we've landed on.
- oh_sigh 7y agoIf you don't have an idea of how many users to expect, your server costs are an unknown too. I don't see how paying per view will change that.
- aasasd 7y ago> 0-50K monthly pageviews $price, 50k-100k another price It's just a way to charge depending on the client's wallet. Standard practice in b2b, so let's be real: nothing new happened with web fonts in this regard.