4 ms·

Call me a bit utilitarian or risk averse, but to me it seems that the free fonts out there cover basically all of the use cases that I could have. Surely there

Call me a bit utilitarian or risk averse, but to me it seems that the free fonts out there cover basically all of the use cases that I could have. Surely there are enough fonts like that to fit most of the designs that you could conceivably come up with? Or do people really look at a font that might cost thousands of USD to use, like Proxima Nova (https://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/proxima-nova https://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/proxima-nova) and go: "Yes, this is exactly what fits my creative vision and nothing less will do!" Not that it wouldn't be worth the price tag for some, but to me that feels like something that only large enterprises for which that's a rounding error might want to do.

seabass-labrax 3y ago
I think it's more that the convenience of Adobe's library of proprietary fonts is appealing to (and relatively inexpensive for) most designers. In my opinion, anything longer than a slogan will probably benefit from the tried-and-tested nature of pedestrian typefaces, and is not the right place for excessive design flair. Nonetheless, it is not trivial to install and manage fonts, nor to understand the licensing obligations of free fonts.
avereveard 3y ago
depends, if you want a consistent font across a website it's hard with free fonts, because these usually come in bold/regular/italic and that's it, professional font will come with all combinations with wide and narrow lettering on top, plus light and black, so it will cover everything from titles to footers, with a good coverage of unicode glyphs on top of it. the free ones that come close, like the dejavu font family, are very few and overused.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  There is one reply to the same comment as yours with a free font that looks pretty much like this one that has about 3 times as many styles as it. And all of them look fine.
  - avereveard 3y ago
    the one I saw lacked condensed versions, but at least metropolis black seems built ok and not an extra bold version like raleway's
heavyset_go 3y ago
What I've learned is that people go insane when it comes to fonts, and sometimes they have good typographical reasons for it, and sometimes they just have strong opinions. Discussions like this bring both types out, and sometimes they're both right.
- kimi 3y ago
  I'm a typography fan, but let's admit it - 90% of the world population could live in world where Courier and Comic Sans would be the only fonts avaiable and would not notice a thing.
  - dctoedt 3y ago
    If you had made the font choices Times New Roman and Arial, I'd have said it's 99.99%.
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      You need at least one monospace font. I'll die on that hill. Throw one in and I'm on your side.
      - dctoedt 3y ago
        Done: Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier — because that's a name known to "normies" — it is!
        __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
        I accept, thanks comrade.
      - pdpi 3y ago
        Jokes aside, given all four combinations of serif/sans * proportional/monospace, with a good variety of weights and italics, and you’ll have covered the vast majority of use cases.
Garvi 3y ago
Looks 99.9% like Raleway to me: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Raleway https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Raleway Sure, I can see the subtle differences, but one costs $1650 for all styles, the other one is free. Most of the letters seem to be only stretched vertically by a few percent, with no other visible differences. If I had a job to create a new font, I wouldn't have the guts turning this in as my original work.
- avree 3y ago
  They're not at all the same font. If your job was creating fonts, you'd notice the differences.
  - tristor 3y ago
    And since most people's jobs are not creating fonts, most people wouldn't notice the difference. There-in lies the challenge. Typography /is/ important, but it may not be as important as typographists think that it is.
    - kbelder 3y ago
      (I tell this story a lot.) I heard an ad on the radio a while back, from the American Podiatry Association, which recommended that everybody should schedule a checkup with their podiatrist once a year to maintain foot health. I am sure that 95% of podiatrists honestly believe that's good and important advice. Just as 95% of font designers honestly think that subtle differences in kerning are strongly impactful.
      - tatersolid 3y ago
        > which recommended that everybody should schedule a checkup with their podiatrist once a year to maintain foot health. Considering the large numbers of diabetics or pre-diabetics in the USA this isn’t actually a stretch.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  They are clearly different if you look at them side by side. Of course, if a document comes with one of them, I certainly wouldn't be able to tell you which one it is. But they are certainly not the same.
basch 3y ago
>"Yes, this is exactly what fits my creative vision and nothing less will do!" It's more like: you are sitting in a room with the c suite, and the design firm they hired to refresh the brand. The design firm sells the c suite on "this font exemplifies who you are and you you want to represent yourself to the world as." Then you chime in and say it looks like every other font and there are legal licensing issues, and the c suite tells you that you are chicken little and the design firm knows what they are doing and will take care of it. They are the experts not you. Why are you even in this meeting? The last time I worked somewhere that brought in outsiders to refresh the brand, the font they ended up standardizing on was .... Proxima Nova.
- basch 3y ago
  Then they will: tell you they want it installed on all desktop computers and all word templates changed to use it, ignoring mobile only people, and the fact that your brand standards will appear for the purchasing department but not anybody outside the company you send the documents to, need to be talked out of using it in email signatures, and that the only safe option is Arial. Which they could have just picked for everything in the first place, ignore the brand standards themselves because conforming to them takes too much time and attention paying. Pretty soon they will forget they even standardized the company on a font, but the mess will still linger.
pdabbadabba 3y ago
> Or do people really look at a font that might cost thousands of USD to use... This is part of the business problem that the Adobe CC subscription solves. I you already have a subscription, which is relatively inexpensive and bundled with Adobe software licenses, then the marginal cost of using a particular font in their library is zero. That said, I've also had a role on the client side and, yes, we spent quite a lot of time discussing which of the font options presented by our designer we preferred and would have happily spent a thousand or two dollars on the one we liked best. Although it seems like a lot for a font, it would have been a very small part of the total budget for the project. As it happened, though, we were simply presented with a total budget for the project, without a line item for font licensing. Either our designer has some sort of CC-style library license, or it was just rolled into the bundled price. In theory, then, maybe the designers have an incentive to use cheaper fonts in situations like this. But it's probably the designers on their team that most want to use the pricey fonts.
- leereeves 3y ago
  Does the designer's CC subscription cover use by their clients?
  - pdabbadabba 3y ago
    I'm not an expert in this area but, according to Adobe, it depends on the use. For rasterized images, PDF documents, etc., the answer seem to be 'yes': > Does my client need their own font license to use the designs? No, not if you are creating graphics or documents that have rasterized or properly embedded font data, such as a PDF, JPEG, or PNG. > However, if your client needs to have the font installed to edit your design, they will need their own license, either through a Creative Cloud subscription or as a desktop license purchase. But for websites, the answer seems considerably more complicated but, essentially, 'no.' > Can I use web fonts for my client websites? The Terms of Use do not permit reselling beyond December 31, 2019. After that time, the client's website must load Adobe Fonts from their own Creative Cloud subscription to ensure that there isn't any interruption to the font licensing or web font hosting. > Please refer to the full Terms of Use for more information on what reselling the service means, and related definitions. . . . [A few more paragraphs about how to switch things over from your CC account to a client's.] https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html Reading between the lines there just a little bit, it seems like Adobe may have run into its own licensing issues. And this all depends on Adobe being correct that they have gotten a license from the creator of the font that allows Adobe, in turn, to convey these rights to the CC subscriber. Uncertainty on exactly these points--Does Adobe allow clients to use the fonts without their own subscription? Does Adobe itself have the rights to allow this?--seems like the root of the issue in the article: >The one useful Adobe representative we spoke to on the phone last week mentioned that numerous people are having trouble with the Adobe licencing with this particular font. She said that Adobe may not have the appropriate licencing for this font listed on the website – unsure if this is reliable information or not, but thought I’d mention, as if this is the case, there should be more information clearly visible on the font’s webpage about how to use it correctly. >From our understanding, we have used the font in the correct way (according to the Adobe Web Project method). However, our client does not have an Adobe subscription, so we concerned that we are not covered by the Adobe licence due to this: https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html.

seabass-labrax 3y ago

I think it's more that the convenience of Adobe's library of proprietary fonts is appealing to (and relatively inexpensive for) most designers. In my opinion, anything longer than a slogan will probably benefit from the tried-and-tested nature of pedestrian typefaces, and is not the right place for excessive design flair. Nonetheless, it is not trivial to install and manage fonts, nor to understand the licensing obligations of free fonts.

avereveard 3y ago

depends, if you want a consistent font across a website it's hard with free fonts, because these usually come in bold/regular/italic and that's it, professional font will come with all combinations with wide and narrow lettering on top, plus light and black, so it will cover everything from titles to footers, with a good coverage of unicode glyphs on top of it. the free ones that come close, like the dejavu font family, are very few and overused.

marcosdumay 3y ago
There is one reply to the same comment as yours with a free font that looks pretty much like this one that has about 3 times as many styles as it. And all of them look fine.
- avereveard 3y ago
  the one I saw lacked condensed versions, but at least metropolis black seems built ok and not an extra bold version like raleway's

heavyset_go 3y ago

What I've learned is that people go insane when it comes to fonts, and sometimes they have good typographical reasons for it, and sometimes they just have strong opinions. Discussions like this bring both types out, and sometimes they're both right.

kimi 3y ago
I'm a typography fan, but let's admit it - 90% of the world population could live in world where Courier and Comic Sans would be the only fonts avaiable and would not notice a thing.
- dctoedt 3y ago
  If you had made the font choices Times New Roman and Arial, I'd have said it's 99.99%.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    You need at least one monospace font. I'll die on that hill. Throw one in and I'm on your side.
    - dctoedt 3y ago
      Done: Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier — because that's a name known to "normies" — it is!
      - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
        I accept, thanks comrade.
    - pdpi 3y ago
      Jokes aside, given all four combinations of serif/sans * proportional/monospace, with a good variety of weights and italics, and you’ll have covered the vast majority of use cases.

Garvi 3y ago

Looks 99.9% like Raleway to me: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Raleway https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Raleway Sure, I can see the subtle differences, but one costs $1650 for all styles, the other one is free. Most of the letters seem to be only stretched vertically by a few percent, with no other visible differences. If I had a job to create a new font, I wouldn't have the guts turning this in as my original work.

avree 3y ago
They're not at all the same font. If your job was creating fonts, you'd notice the differences.
- tristor 3y ago
  And since most people's jobs are not creating fonts, most people wouldn't notice the difference. There-in lies the challenge. Typography /is/ important, but it may not be as important as typographists think that it is.
  - kbelder 3y ago
    (I tell this story a lot.) I heard an ad on the radio a while back, from the American Podiatry Association, which recommended that everybody should schedule a checkup with their podiatrist once a year to maintain foot health. I am sure that 95% of podiatrists honestly believe that's good and important advice. Just as 95% of font designers honestly think that subtle differences in kerning are strongly impactful.
    - tatersolid 3y ago
      > which recommended that everybody should schedule a checkup with their podiatrist once a year to maintain foot health. Considering the large numbers of diabetics or pre-diabetics in the USA this isn’t actually a stretch.
marcosdumay 3y ago
They are clearly different if you look at them side by side. Of course, if a document comes with one of them, I certainly wouldn't be able to tell you which one it is. But they are certainly not the same.

basch 3y ago

>"Yes, this is exactly what fits my creative vision and nothing less will do!" It's more like: you are sitting in a room with the c suite, and the design firm they hired to refresh the brand. The design firm sells the c suite on "this font exemplifies who you are and you you want to represent yourself to the world as." Then you chime in and say it looks like every other font and there are legal licensing issues, and the c suite tells you that you are chicken little and the design firm knows what they are doing and will take care of it. They are the experts not you. Why are you even in this meeting? The last time I worked somewhere that brought in outsiders to refresh the brand, the font they ended up standardizing on was .... Proxima Nova.

basch 3y ago
Then they will: tell you they want it installed on all desktop computers and all word templates changed to use it, ignoring mobile only people, and the fact that your brand standards will appear for the purchasing department but not anybody outside the company you send the documents to, need to be talked out of using it in email signatures, and that the only safe option is Arial. Which they could have just picked for everything in the first place, ignore the brand standards themselves because conforming to them takes too much time and attention paying. Pretty soon they will forget they even standardized the company on a font, but the mess will still linger.

pdabbadabba 3y ago

> Or do people really look at a font that might cost thousands of USD to use... This is part of the business problem that the Adobe CC subscription solves. I you already have a subscription, which is relatively inexpensive and bundled with Adobe software licenses, then the marginal cost of using a particular font in their library is zero. That said, I've also had a role on the client side and, yes, we spent quite a lot of time discussing which of the font options presented by our designer we preferred and would have happily spent a thousand or two dollars on the one we liked best. Although it seems like a lot for a font, it would have been a very small part of the total budget for the project. As it happened, though, we were simply presented with a total budget for the project, without a line item for font licensing. Either our designer has some sort of CC-style library license, or it was just rolled into the bundled price. In theory, then, maybe the designers have an incentive to use cheaper fonts in situations like this. But it's probably the designers on their team that most want to use the pricey fonts.

leereeves 3y ago
Does the designer's CC subscription cover use by their clients?
- pdabbadabba 3y ago
  I'm not an expert in this area but, according to Adobe, it depends on the use. For rasterized images, PDF documents, etc., the answer seem to be 'yes': > Does my client need their own font license to use the designs? No, not if you are creating graphics or documents that have rasterized or properly embedded font data, such as a PDF, JPEG, or PNG. > However, if your client needs to have the font installed to edit your design, they will need their own license, either through a Creative Cloud subscription or as a desktop license purchase. But for websites, the answer seems considerably more complicated but, essentially, 'no.' > Can I use web fonts for my client websites? The Terms of Use do not permit reselling beyond December 31, 2019. After that time, the client's website must load Adobe Fonts from their own Creative Cloud subscription to ensure that there isn't any interruption to the font licensing or web font hosting. > Please refer to the full Terms of Use for more information on what reselling the service means, and related definitions. . . . [A few more paragraphs about how to switch things over from your CC account to a client's.] https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html Reading between the lines there just a little bit, it seems like Adobe may have run into its own licensing issues. And this all depends on Adobe being correct that they have gotten a license from the creator of the font that allows Adobe, in turn, to convey these rights to the CC subscriber. Uncertainty on exactly these points--Does Adobe allow clients to use the fonts without their own subscription? Does Adobe itself have the rights to allow this?--seems like the root of the issue in the article: >The one useful Adobe representative we spoke to on the phone last week mentioned that numerous people are having trouble with the Adobe licencing with this particular font. She said that Adobe may not have the appropriate licencing for this font listed on the website – unsure if this is reliable information or not, but thought I’d mention, as if this is the case, there should be more information clearly visible on the font’s webpage about how to use it correctly. >From our understanding, we have used the font in the correct way (according to the Adobe Web Project method). However, our client does not have an Adobe subscription, so we concerned that we are not covered by the Adobe licence due to this: https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html.