8 ms·

I agree the average person is likely fine with the fonts on their computer, but this is profoundly misunderstanding the importance of design. Typefaces are incr

I agree the average person is likely fine with the fonts on their computer, but this is profoundly misunderstanding the importance of design. Typefaces are incredibly important, and have been for centuries. I'd argue that complaining about font prices is less like a Hermes bag, and more like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.

Aeolun 1y ago
Modern included fonts aren’t that bad. It’s more like using tomato sauce instead of fancy handmade chilli. Your meal doesn’t deeply suffer, it’s just a bit bland.
- Nevermark 1y ago
  Branding is very important. Branding requires being distinctive, mixing novel visual and other aspects in a pleasing way. As far as I have been able to tell no major platform ships with the universal font of fonts (full coverage of all possible fonts with 4.5Mb seed) “AnyStyleYouWant” font. And none of the fonts they do ship have the “distinctive” feature. Until that day comes…
  - int_19h 1y ago
    Please keep your "branding" out of my UI. What I want from text in the apps I use is legibility first and foremost, not them screaming the brand at me every second I'm staring at them.
- hattmall 1y ago
  And importantly... Just like with food, the overwhelming majority of people will not notice at all. Even trained wine tasters can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine reliably. Normal people can't even tell what flavor of skittle they are eating without the visual color cue.
fmbb 1y ago
There are roughly zero apps out there that would ”deeply suffer” from having to use freely available and/or system supported fonts.
- gkoberger 1y ago
  That's not true at all. You think games would feel as immersive if everything was Calibri? Magazine-style articles would feel as tactile if they all used the same system fonts? Etc. You may not care about fonts, but to say they don't matter is a misunderstanding. For example, I could glibly say we only need one programming language (the user doesn't care what syntax you used before it was compiled down to 1s and 0s!), but any engineer would make the case why that's not true at all.
  - shermantanktop 1y ago
    I admire your passion, but... as someone who is not deeply interested in fonts, I view them in largely functional terms. Can I read it? Does it look ok? Programming language choice has an aesthetic side, but it is also very much a functional concern. Can I write secure code? Will it be performant? Will it be maintainable? Different languages represent different functional tradeoffs. Are fonts really the same kind of thing? IOW, how would you make a choice between using Arial vs. Helvetica?
    - gkoberger 1y ago
      Arial v Helvetica is an interesting example, because Arial was designed basically as a cost-efficient alternative to Helvetica. So, the reason you'd choose between the two is exactly the thing the original comment was complaining about – licensing! They were designed to be metrically compatible... meaning, the character widths and spaces are exactly the same. This means that switching to Arial won't affect the layout of your document. This was more important when things were more analog, but it's still important with digital documents: for example, it could mess up the number of pages, which would affect meta content or create line breaks that seem meaningful but aren't. Additionally, having things like a widow (a word by itself on a new line) can disrupt the visual flow and draw focus to or away from content in ways you don't desire. But just because those two typefaces are quite similar (and the reason to pick between them is largely financial/convenience) doesn't mean you'd never want to have more fine-grained control over the text you're working with. You mentioned security. When I'm editing this comment, 0 and O are very different (the zero has a slash through it), however when I hit save they look quite similar. (But because we're all using system fonts on HN, it might be different for you). While it's often just a stylistic choice, in many situations the two characters would be indistinguishable and that would be an issue, which is why someone might choose a typeface where characters are significantly different. Think a password you have to transcribe. If you know your font will be used in a quite small size, you may want one that is optimized for being read at tiny sizes. If you're displaying something technical, a monowidth font is better suited. And all of this focused on utility for the most part; I'm leaving out all the reasons you'd want it for stylistic reasons. If you're trying to make people feel at ease, you may want typeface where the end of the strokes are rounded, for example. Sometimes you want people to feel a certain way, in the same way you modulate your tone when talking.
babypuncher 1y ago
My problem with this analogy is that there are dozens if not hundreds of free typefaces that are exceptionally high quality and have stood the test of time. The "problem" with free typefaces isn't their quality, it's their ubiquity. Since everyone can use them, they are used everywhere. Licensing something less common can help your product stand out from the crowd.
- moron4hire 1y ago
  Or you could try implementing good features to try to stand out from the crowd. Frankly, non-default fonts outside of the logo are a red flag to me. They signal a team that has put form so far over function that the function is almost guaranteed to not be fit for purpose.
bigiain 1y ago
So "Typefaces are incredibly important", just not important enough to pay for (or create yourself)???
- gkoberger 1y ago
  The OP didn't say they didn't want to pay, they're saying there's been a shift toward per-impression pricing which is often unsustainable for even the most lucrative apps.
  - bigiain 1y ago
    So, using the OP's own comparison, I should be able to pay a one off "saffron purchase", and then be able to use as much saffron as I want from the supermarket for every meal I ever make in the future? ;-)
    - gkoberger 1y ago
      No, because Saffron is a physical commodity with inherent production costs, supply chain logistics, and a finite supply. A better analogy would be that if you bought a saffron crocus, you shouldn't have to pay a monthly fee to harvest it.
      - tptacek 1y ago
        This doesn't mean anything. Things are not generally sold at their bill of materials cost. If you don't want to pay what Monotype is charging, don't use Monotype faces. It's exactly that simple. There a gajillion alternative faces, and a very large number of them are of high quality.
        graemep 1y ago
        > Things are not generally sold at their bill of materials cost In a perfectly competitive market things are sold at cost of production + a small markup.
lolinder 1y ago
Even under this analogy you're complaining about the price of luxury goods and saying that it's no wonder people shoplift to steal the truffles because they're so darn expensive. If you can't afford the license for the font, your app is small-time enough that you can make do with one of the many, many high-quality fonts that are available for free, there's no need to pirate it. If your app is big enough that the difference matters, then you can likely afford the sticker price.
- gkoberger 1y ago
  No, I'm saying a Michelin chef can complain about a 50x increase in the cost of truffles without negating the fact that a lot of people happily survive on ramen.
  - gobengo 1y ago
    op isn't saying you shouldn't complain. op is saying you shouldn't steal instead of complaining
    - gkoberger 1y ago
      I think there's some confusion in who is responding to whom, then. I never said anything about piracy, but the person responding to me may have confused me with the top-level comment. All I have done is defend the importance of typography, and never mentioned piracy or stealing.
      - dcow 1y ago
        Typography is important. So important that we have really good looking fonts available for free. And a custom font isn’t going to be the deciding factor in whether your next AI powered social graph app sinks or floats. Guaranteed.
        behringer 1y ago
        Then why are the fonts so expensive?
wubrr 1y ago
> misunderstanding the importance of design Almost every font, style, pattern, component used in any new app today has already been designed, implemented, redesigned and reimplemented 20 times over. 'The importance of design' and all of the associated rhetorical BS only really serve to keep redundant (imo) designers employed. > like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer. Can you actually make an objective argument for why certain fonts are more high-quality than existing free/open fonts, or how free/open fonts will make a product deeply suffer? I'd wager you can't. I've worked closely with many designers behind some very popular 'nice' award-winning apps. I've listened to endless rhetorical BS about how 'this specific element of the design is incredibly important and any deviation is a major hit to the product quality'. These same designers very very rarely even notice when an incorrect font/color, styling/layout is used, while arguing that any such deviation will ruin customer trust destroy the app. Complete BS.
brailsafe 1y ago
Yes, and no, but why and when? What makes any particular typeface more or less important had it been something different? When I was younger and a bit more haughty about design, I would have agreed, but now I feel like I need more to substantiate the claim, even thought I feel like I agree. > I'd argue that complaining about font prices is less like a Hermes bag, and more like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer. This also needs a bit more. In what cases would some dish suffer "deeply" simply from having used commodity ingredients (a quality that's a core tenant in many famous designers' approaches)? You could more easily argue that something isn't the same as another, or perhaps less appealing visually, or perhaps less nutritionally dense, but it all seems a bit specious to me. Some cases would be significant, such as the choice of a garden tomato over a store tomato, but that's hardly a high-end concern, and why would high-end concerns be all that important anyway? My opinion is that design is as important as the problems it solves or the outcome it produces, and the existence and selection of appropriate typefaces can be a core component in that, it would not be easy to make a strong value oriented argument for the discrete choice of one expensive typeface over another commodity typeface unless one evidently solves a problem better, or its value is already established because of the association with an existing identity that already uses it. That's not to say they aren't worth paying for, or that licensing them isn't an issue, it's just kind of a debatable question how much one over another is worth or how important it is, much like art in general or other creative works.
cgio 1y ago
I guess if they are so important we should be paying for them. Not that you argue against it per se, but in discussion context.
fooker 1y ago
> Typefaces are incredibly important, and have been for centuries. Is there hard statistical evidence for this?
hiccuphippo 1y ago
To buy fonts you have to care about design but not too much. If you do then you'll draw your text so it's a unique "font" instead of buying a premade font that other people can also buy.
smcameron 1y ago
[flagged]
hnfong 1y ago
If you often use custom fonts that aren't preinstalled on typical systems, I can't help but wonder whether you also painstakingly choose fonts for non-latin character/non-latin based languages? I'll admit opening a can of worms on purpose, but if you're going for the "high-end", ignoring the i18n implications seems like a crime on its own, and yet most people don't really have the design expertise to evaluate whether a font looks good in another totally foreign language...
- nine_k 1y ago
  Non-Latin? Well, OK, Greek and Cyrillic are close enough to Latin to be able to design the font for them following approximately the same style which apply to the Latin characters. You can make a Cyrillic Tahoma or a Greek Signika in line with the Latin variants. I'd say that this is the reasonable limit of non-latin support. If you take Hebrew, Korean, Georgian, Armenian, Thai, hiragana, katakana, you're in trouble. They all have different proportions, traditions, connections. You can stylize them a bit to be reminiscent of the way the Latin font is made, but you'll have hard time making a Hebrew font with large serifs like Bodoni, and will have hard time making it materially different from Times New Roman in a convincing way. It's better to make a separate typeface. Arabic / Persian / Urdu, or hanji are their own worlds altogether, hardly comparable to Western typography.
johnisgood 1y ago
> Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer. This heavily depends. As I mentioned before, cheaper materials did not always mean shittier, especially when it comes to cooking. Around here, healthy food is still cheaper (especially the ingredients) than junk food, although the recent increase in prices (of everything) is wild.
nine_k 1y ago
There is a large number of free qualify fonts available at fonts.google.com, many of them are free for commercial use outside the web. There is also a handful of pretty good fonts not included in that collection but also freely available. (This is on top of good collections of fonts shipped with major OSes.) There is a number of free fonts which are also free for commercial use, but are clearly inadequate for serious typographic work, or only contain highly stylized glyphs. They may still be perfectly usable for a game, or a mobile app which is not typography-heavy. In many cases, the shortcomings are only visible at paper resolution, or only in print as opposed to screen. Then, there is a number of not very expensive fonts that cost $50-100 per face. If you really badly need a font exactly like that for a commercial project, and $200-300 is a prohibitively expensive for a permanent license you obtain, how much is the commercial project worth? Is it worth sweating over that very particular font?
immibis 1y ago
If they're profoundly important for the design of your money-making app, the principle of "fuck you, pay me" applies. If you're making $50,000 every year and you couldn't do that without the design and you couldn't do the design without the font, pay up. If they're profoundly important for the design of your free software app... we all know how likely it is for a free software app to have good design. You'd be the first.

Aeolun 1y ago

Modern included fonts aren’t that bad. It’s more like using tomato sauce instead of fancy handmade chilli. Your meal doesn’t deeply suffer, it’s just a bit bland.

Nevermark 1y ago
Branding is very important. Branding requires being distinctive, mixing novel visual and other aspects in a pleasing way. As far as I have been able to tell no major platform ships with the universal font of fonts (full coverage of all possible fonts with 4.5Mb seed) “AnyStyleYouWant” font. And none of the fonts they do ship have the “distinctive” feature. Until that day comes…
- int_19h 1y ago
  Please keep your "branding" out of my UI. What I want from text in the apps I use is legibility first and foremost, not them screaming the brand at me every second I'm staring at them.
hattmall 1y ago
And importantly... Just like with food, the overwhelming majority of people will not notice at all. Even trained wine tasters can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine reliably. Normal people can't even tell what flavor of skittle they are eating without the visual color cue.

fmbb 1y ago

There are roughly zero apps out there that would ”deeply suffer” from having to use freely available and/or system supported fonts.

gkoberger 1y ago
That's not true at all. You think games would feel as immersive if everything was Calibri? Magazine-style articles would feel as tactile if they all used the same system fonts? Etc. You may not care about fonts, but to say they don't matter is a misunderstanding. For example, I could glibly say we only need one programming language (the user doesn't care what syntax you used before it was compiled down to 1s and 0s!), but any engineer would make the case why that's not true at all.
- shermantanktop 1y ago
  I admire your passion, but... as someone who is not deeply interested in fonts, I view them in largely functional terms. Can I read it? Does it look ok? Programming language choice has an aesthetic side, but it is also very much a functional concern. Can I write secure code? Will it be performant? Will it be maintainable? Different languages represent different functional tradeoffs. Are fonts really the same kind of thing? IOW, how would you make a choice between using Arial vs. Helvetica?
  - gkoberger 1y ago
    Arial v Helvetica is an interesting example, because Arial was designed basically as a cost-efficient alternative to Helvetica. So, the reason you'd choose between the two is exactly the thing the original comment was complaining about – licensing! They were designed to be metrically compatible... meaning, the character widths and spaces are exactly the same. This means that switching to Arial won't affect the layout of your document. This was more important when things were more analog, but it's still important with digital documents: for example, it could mess up the number of pages, which would affect meta content or create line breaks that seem meaningful but aren't. Additionally, having things like a widow (a word by itself on a new line) can disrupt the visual flow and draw focus to or away from content in ways you don't desire. But just because those two typefaces are quite similar (and the reason to pick between them is largely financial/convenience) doesn't mean you'd never want to have more fine-grained control over the text you're working with. You mentioned security. When I'm editing this comment, 0 and O are very different (the zero has a slash through it), however when I hit save they look quite similar. (But because we're all using system fonts on HN, it might be different for you). While it's often just a stylistic choice, in many situations the two characters would be indistinguishable and that would be an issue, which is why someone might choose a typeface where characters are significantly different. Think a password you have to transcribe. If you know your font will be used in a quite small size, you may want one that is optimized for being read at tiny sizes. If you're displaying something technical, a monowidth font is better suited. And all of this focused on utility for the most part; I'm leaving out all the reasons you'd want it for stylistic reasons. If you're trying to make people feel at ease, you may want typeface where the end of the strokes are rounded, for example. Sometimes you want people to feel a certain way, in the same way you modulate your tone when talking.

babypuncher 1y ago

My problem with this analogy is that there are dozens if not hundreds of free typefaces that are exceptionally high quality and have stood the test of time. The "problem" with free typefaces isn't their quality, it's their ubiquity. Since everyone can use them, they are used everywhere. Licensing something less common can help your product stand out from the crowd.

moron4hire 1y ago
Or you could try implementing good features to try to stand out from the crowd. Frankly, non-default fonts outside of the logo are a red flag to me. They signal a team that has put form so far over function that the function is almost guaranteed to not be fit for purpose.

bigiain 1y ago

So "Typefaces are incredibly important", just not important enough to pay for (or create yourself)???

gkoberger 1y ago
The OP didn't say they didn't want to pay, they're saying there's been a shift toward per-impression pricing which is often unsustainable for even the most lucrative apps.
- bigiain 1y ago
  So, using the OP's own comparison, I should be able to pay a one off "saffron purchase", and then be able to use as much saffron as I want from the supermarket for every meal I ever make in the future? ;-)
  - gkoberger 1y ago
    No, because Saffron is a physical commodity with inherent production costs, supply chain logistics, and a finite supply. A better analogy would be that if you bought a saffron crocus, you shouldn't have to pay a monthly fee to harvest it.
    - tptacek 1y ago
      This doesn't mean anything. Things are not generally sold at their bill of materials cost. If you don't want to pay what Monotype is charging, don't use Monotype faces. It's exactly that simple. There a gajillion alternative faces, and a very large number of them are of high quality.
      - graemep 1y ago
        > Things are not generally sold at their bill of materials cost In a perfectly competitive market things are sold at cost of production + a small markup.

lolinder 1y ago

Even under this analogy you're complaining about the price of luxury goods and saying that it's no wonder people shoplift to steal the truffles because they're so darn expensive. If you can't afford the license for the font, your app is small-time enough that you can make do with one of the many, many high-quality fonts that are available for free, there's no need to pirate it. If your app is big enough that the difference matters, then you can likely afford the sticker price.

gkoberger 1y ago
No, I'm saying a Michelin chef can complain about a 50x increase in the cost of truffles without negating the fact that a lot of people happily survive on ramen.
- gobengo 1y ago
  op isn't saying you shouldn't complain. op is saying you shouldn't steal instead of complaining
  - gkoberger 1y ago
    I think there's some confusion in who is responding to whom, then. I never said anything about piracy, but the person responding to me may have confused me with the top-level comment. All I have done is defend the importance of typography, and never mentioned piracy or stealing.
    - dcow 1y ago
      Typography is important. So important that we have really good looking fonts available for free. And a custom font isn’t going to be the deciding factor in whether your next AI powered social graph app sinks or floats. Guaranteed.
      - behringer 1y ago
        Then why are the fonts so expensive?

wubrr 1y ago

> misunderstanding the importance of design Almost every font, style, pattern, component used in any new app today has already been designed, implemented, redesigned and reimplemented 20 times over. 'The importance of design' and all of the associated rhetorical BS only really serve to keep redundant (imo) designers employed. > like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer. Can you actually make an objective argument for why certain fonts are more high-quality than existing free/open fonts, or how free/open fonts will make a product deeply suffer? I'd wager you can't. I've worked closely with many designers behind some very popular 'nice' award-winning apps. I've listened to endless rhetorical BS about how 'this specific element of the design is incredibly important and any deviation is a major hit to the product quality'. These same designers very very rarely even notice when an incorrect font/color, styling/layout is used, while arguing that any such deviation will ruin customer trust destroy the app. Complete BS.

brailsafe 1y ago

Yes, and no, but why and when? What makes any particular typeface more or less important had it been something different? When I was younger and a bit more haughty about design, I would have agreed, but now I feel like I need more to substantiate the claim, even thought I feel like I agree. > I'd argue that complaining about font prices is less like a Hermes bag, and more like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer. This also needs a bit more. In what cases would some dish suffer "deeply" simply from having used commodity ingredients (a quality that's a core tenant in many famous designers' approaches)? You could more easily argue that something isn't the same as another, or perhaps less appealing visually, or perhaps less nutritionally dense, but it all seems a bit specious to me. Some cases would be significant, such as the choice of a garden tomato over a store tomato, but that's hardly a high-end concern, and why would high-end concerns be all that important anyway? My opinion is that design is as important as the problems it solves or the outcome it produces, and the existence and selection of appropriate typefaces can be a core component in that, it would not be easy to make a strong value oriented argument for the discrete choice of one expensive typeface over another commodity typeface unless one evidently solves a problem better, or its value is already established because of the association with an existing identity that already uses it. That's not to say they aren't worth paying for, or that licensing them isn't an issue, it's just kind of a debatable question how much one over another is worth or how important it is, much like art in general or other creative works.

cgio 1y ago

I guess if they are so important we should be paying for them. Not that you argue against it per se, but in discussion context.

fooker 1y ago

> Typefaces are incredibly important, and have been for centuries. Is there hard statistical evidence for this?

hiccuphippo 1y ago

To buy fonts you have to care about design but not too much. If you do then you'll draw your text so it's a unique "font" instead of buying a premade font that other people can also buy.

smcameron 1y ago

[flagged]

hnfong 1y ago

If you often use custom fonts that aren't preinstalled on typical systems, I can't help but wonder whether you also painstakingly choose fonts for non-latin character/non-latin based languages? I'll admit opening a can of worms on purpose, but if you're going for the "high-end", ignoring the i18n implications seems like a crime on its own, and yet most people don't really have the design expertise to evaluate whether a font looks good in another totally foreign language...

nine_k 1y ago
Non-Latin? Well, OK, Greek and Cyrillic are close enough to Latin to be able to design the font for them following approximately the same style which apply to the Latin characters. You can make a Cyrillic Tahoma or a Greek Signika in line with the Latin variants. I'd say that this is the reasonable limit of non-latin support. If you take Hebrew, Korean, Georgian, Armenian, Thai, hiragana, katakana, you're in trouble. They all have different proportions, traditions, connections. You can stylize them a bit to be reminiscent of the way the Latin font is made, but you'll have hard time making a Hebrew font with large serifs like Bodoni, and will have hard time making it materially different from Times New Roman in a convincing way. It's better to make a separate typeface. Arabic / Persian / Urdu, or hanji are their own worlds altogether, hardly comparable to Western typography.

johnisgood 1y ago

> Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer. This heavily depends. As I mentioned before, cheaper materials did not always mean shittier, especially when it comes to cooking. Around here, healthy food is still cheaper (especially the ingredients) than junk food, although the recent increase in prices (of everything) is wild.

nine_k 1y ago

There is a large number of free qualify fonts available at fonts.google.com, many of them are free for commercial use outside the web. There is also a handful of pretty good fonts not included in that collection but also freely available. (This is on top of good collections of fonts shipped with major OSes.) There is a number of free fonts which are also free for commercial use, but are clearly inadequate for serious typographic work, or only contain highly stylized glyphs. They may still be perfectly usable for a game, or a mobile app which is not typography-heavy. In many cases, the shortcomings are only visible at paper resolution, or only in print as opposed to screen. Then, there is a number of not very expensive fonts that cost $50-100 per face. If you really badly need a font exactly like that for a commercial project, and $200-300 is a prohibitively expensive for a permanent license you obtain, how much is the commercial project worth? Is it worth sweating over that very particular font?

immibis 1y ago

If they're profoundly important for the design of your money-making app, the principle of "fuck you, pay me" applies. If you're making $50,000 every year and you couldn't do that without the design and you couldn't do the design without the font, pay up. If they're profoundly important for the design of your free software app... we all know how likely it is for a free software app to have good design. You'd be the first.