4 ms·

I don't know about expecting them to be FREE. But sometimes I have to laugh at the licensing terms I see on some fonts. I have a weird fascination with fonts.

I don't know about expecting them to be FREE. But sometimes I have to laugh at the licensing terms I see on some fonts. I have a weird fascination with fonts. They're pleasing to look at, and interesting to compare. But come on. At the end of the day, pretty much 95+% of contemporary fonts are trivial little tweaks to Garamond, Baskerville, Helvetica, Century, or some other font that hasn't been novel for centuries. What people are paying for are the most subtle of cues, to make their text subconsciously distinguishable from the next magazine or marketing campaign. For a few years, until the new font becomes old-hat or commonplace, and needs to be revamped again to keep your brand subconsciously fresh. Obviously there is commercial value in this, or else people wouldn't pay the amounts that they pay for fonts. But I don't understand why we lionize font designers the way the we do.

mrunseen 5y ago
Type design is never finished business. We do new faces, and sometimes just for the sake of novelty. It is even not needs to be new. Helvetica was designed by Max Miedinger and released by Haas Foundry in 1957. Then it was revised in 1983 as Neue Helvetica. Later, in 2010, it was digitally revived for Bloomberg, with faith on Miedinger’s original designs, and now considered to be best digital design amongst designers (you can even see it’s been mentioned in this thread too). Is it a bad thing that it was revived, even though there were a lot of digital designs(Nimbus Sans and such)? I don’t feel so. Why do we need new typefaces: https://klim.co.nz/blog/why-we-need-new-typefaces/ https://klim.co.nz/blog/why-we-need-new-typefaces/