7 ms·

The Sorry State of Native App Typography Licensing

81 points by idan 14y ago

darknoon 14y ago
I've been bitten by this licensing problem many times. For some beautiful well-known fonts, fees can be in the 10s of thousands of dollars if you want multiple weights….
shardling 14y ago
Desktop and webfont pricing [for fontspring] is identical, but appfonts are ten times the price! I think the blogger made a mistake here: desktop licenses are per 5 users, web licenses are per 500k page views, but app licenses seem to be for any number. The app license even explicitly states b. Licensee may embed the Font into an unlimited number of copies of the App. (As a tangential aside, why the heck does HN still not have a syntax for blockquoting!?)
- atestu 14y ago
  You're right, same for web licenses for which you pay per page view.
- masklinn 14y ago
  > I think the blogger made a mistake here: desktop licenses are per 5 users, web licenses are per 500k page views, but app licenses seem to be for any number. Indeed. So the "mobile" license is equivalent to 50 desktop users or 5 million pageviews in price, but without the limits.
- tptacek 14y ago
  Another potential difference might be that most (not all) webfont licensing situations involve content that is controlled entirely by the licensee, but app licenses might frequently involve scenarios where the licensee's customers control the content. For instance, Instapaper has effectively obtained a license for typesetting pretty much everything on the Internet in FF Meta.
kanamekun 14y ago
Couldn't agree more! That's why the open font movement is so exciting... some of the fonts available are great: * http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/ http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/ * http://iginomarini.com/fell/the-revival-fonts/ http://iginomarini.com/fell/the-revival-fonts/ * http://www.openfontlibrary.org/ http://www.openfontlibrary.org/ Open fonts are where open source was a decade or so ago... but the trend is already clear.
- tptacek 14y ago
  There are a few decent open fonts now (and then a whole lot of novelty display faces, and a fair number of knockoffs), but it is unlikely that the "open font movement" is going to displace H+FJ or the like any time soon. As Andrew points out downthread, creating a complete set of hinted fonts for a face is tremendously expensive and time consuming, and for the people with the resources to devote time mastering the craft, there's a functioning market for the work.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    There are a few decent open fonts now (and then a whole lot of novelty display faces, and a fair number of knockoffs), but it is unlikely that the "open font movement" is going to displace H+FJ or the like any time soon. That's an unfortunate example. H&FJ do excellent work, but a lot of people simply can't use it (legally, at least) because of their archaic licensing. You can't use their fonts on the web with @font-face. You can't even embed them in PDFs you're going to distribute, without paying for some mysterious extension to the standard licence. They displaced themselves from those markets, and given that there are now some free web fonts available that are very good by any standards, I suspect H&FJ will never establish themselves in that market in the way they could have. Perhaps from a commercial point of view it doesn't matter to them, if their focus is the high-end, money-no-object-for-our-brand customers that I suspect they rely on for the bulk of their revenues. If you count people like the President of the United States among your customers, I imagine that makes up for quite a few Joe Webmasters.
    - tptacek 14y ago
garrickvanburen 14y ago
This is a huge reason why I currently only use and only recommend using openly licensed fonts (OFL, Apache, etc). The state of openly licensed fonts has significantly improved in the past 3 years.
Hupo 14y ago
There's lots of great free-for-commercial-usage typefaces out there. If you don't already have Fontsquirrel[1] (who also has a fantastic @font-face generator[2]) bookmarked, you should fix that immediately. Google Web Fonts[3] is also another (obvious) resource. [1] http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ [2] http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator [3] http://www.google.com/webfonts http://www.google.com/webfonts Also, while I'm at it, I guess I could name some typefaces I've grown quite fond of: Alegreya, Aller, Cabin, Delicious, Fontin Sans, Lato, Open Sans, PT Sans, Puritan, Quattrocento Sans, Rosario, Source Sans Pro, Ubuntu. All great stuff!
typicons 14y ago
Still, having to inquire about the price of something that my brain perceives as a commodity is jarring. Love this line. http://www.youworkforthem.com http://www.youworkforthem.com offers licensing for mobile apps at checkout. Interestingly, the price difference between eBook and mobile app is the same.
hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
Let me fix the title: "The Sorry State of Typography Licensing" It has always been, and will continue to be, a pain, because the foundries have the same mindset as recording labels, movie studios, etc.
- tptacek 14y ago
  Yes: that their work, which is simultaneously an incredibly time consuming craft and a luxury good that nobody can reasonably claim a native entitlement to, deserves to be remunerated at rates that the market sets.
  - theevocater 14y ago
    I think the point the article is trying to make is that they would make more money if they didn't price out most (perceived) buyers.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      I get the point the article is making, but I think the article is wrong. Just because web nerds don't understand why a good is priced the way it is doesn't make that pricing irrational. You can't even license H+FJ fonts for web applications; they're not even "priced out" - you have to be one of the "cool kids" to use them. H+FJ seems to be doing just fine.
      - Silhouette 14y ago
        You can't even license H+FJ fonts for web applications; they're not even "priced out" - you have to be one of the "cool kids" to use them. So in other words, hcarvalhoalves was right, and the state of typography licensing in general really is a mess.
        tptacek 14y ago
        No, products not being made available to you on the terms and pricing you demand do not mean the market in which those products are offered is a "mess". The perspective you (and this posting) espouse is profoundly narcissistic.
apaprocki 14y ago
I'd just like to point out that it costs upwards of $1 million USD to design and implement a serious Unicode font from scratch (full TT hinting, all styles/weights, multiple glyph sets). So keep that in mind when referring to licensing fees. The license cost compared to the cost of production is very, very small.
- kanamekun 14y ago
  Focusing on the high cost of providing a complex product can be dangerous. The theory of disruptive innovation is that many products are overly complex and priced too high. As Clayton Christensen put it, "[D]isruptive innovations ... offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream." [1] In this case, a serious Unicode font with full TT hinting, all styles/weights, multiple glyph sets is seriously over-serving the needs of the mobile app market. I am currently building a mobile app that uses beautiful typography, and open fonts are working wonderfully for me. I don't need any of the extra font features you mentioned; I don't even need bold and italics versions of my fonts for my apps. This form of disruption is called "low-end disruption" and "targets customers who do not need the full performance valued by customers at the high end of the market." [2] Open fonts very much fit that description, and their growth trajectory suggests that they will serve that role well. Over time, the high-end market players tend to get eaten alive by an innovative low-end disruptor who upgrade their offerings and price points. For examples, see Nucor in steel and Toyota in cars. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation#The_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation#The_theor... [2] Christensen, Clayton M. (2003). The Innovator's Solution : Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
- antoncohen 14y ago
  Can you help me understand that cost? I'm having trouble imagining 10 people getting paid $100k/year, working full-time for a year on a font. The Ubuntu font family is a serious font, it includes 13 fonts covering 1200 glyphes and 200-250 languages. It took about a year to develop. While 10 people might have worked on it in total, it would have been done in phases, not 10 people for a full year. Maybe Canonical did pay a million dollars... did they?
DieBuche 14y ago
You have to consider that it's trivially easy to extract the full fonts from the app the enduser receives. For iOS just unzip the .ipa file, go to the Resources folder et voilà.
- hrabago 14y ago
  If someone is able and willing to do that, wouldn't that person likewise be able to extract the full fonts from a website using such a font? If so, I'm not sure what your point is.
- madewulf 14y ago
  I thought that too might prevent foundries to license their fonts, but it turns out that services like typekit are in fact already putting these fonts online, without any real guarantee against pirating. It's just not very convenient to do right now, but definitely doable, as stated by typekit themselves : http://blog.typekit.com/2009/07/21/serving-and-protecting-fonts-on-the-web/ http://blog.typekit.com/2009/07/21/serving-and-protecting-fo... So, if foundries are allowing that on the web, why the special treatment in native apps? That is one of the points of the article.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
tptacek 14y ago
It is hard to imagine something that is less of a "commodity" than a high-end designer font. Literally everyone in the world with a computer or smartphone has numerous highly serviceable fonts at their disposal; if you're looking to license a designer font, the sole rational reason you'd be doing it is to de-commoditize your typesetting.
shiven 14y ago
Love Open Fonts! Wrote my doctoral thesis[0] in LaTeX, typeset in Gentium Plus and other Open SIL fonts[1]. [0] http://escholarship.umassmed.edu/gsbs_diss/562/ http://escholarship.umassmed.edu/gsbs_diss/562/ [1] http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=Gentium http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=Gentium
heddhunter 14y ago
I just went through this exact situation a few days ago. The designer of the app chose Avenir, which is included in iOS 6 but is not part of Android, so I reached out to Linotype to find out how to license it for an Android app. The responses were confusing and inexact (and slow - apparently they only have sales staff in Germany, and I'm in California, so the time difference means every go round takes a whole day). After 2-3 email exchanges I gave up trying to get a coherent answer and we're using a bundled-with-Android font. Oh well!
tblancpain 14y ago
The author is correct that app licensing is in its infancy, just like webfonts licensing was completely unstructured a few years ago. Constructing this as some sort of malicious action of foundries is quite far from the truth, though. In the fairy land of foundries, there's the great and unrivaled king – Monotype – and then there's a thousand princelings with a few princes (Adobe, FontFont) sparkled in between. Type is a TINY market. In a back of the envelope calculation last year, I found that the whole type industry is generating around $120m – $150m in sales every year. Monotype/Linotype is around $50m of that pie already. Adobe Type is another $20m is I recall correctly. FontFont is a private company but I take their overall revenue is something like $10m. Most other foundries are 2 men operations that produce a small profit but not enough to make huge technological investments like hand-hinting the complete back catalog. At that point a foundry has three options: 1) Not offer their catalog for web- and app licensing at all. The respected resellers / foundry VLLG (Village, http://vllg.com http://vllg.com) does this currently, for example. 2) Offer them on request, with the possibility of having a conversation with the customer about their expectations and what they're really getting for their money. See the note in the sidebar on http://commercialtype.com/typefaces/atlas http://commercialtype.com/typefaces/atlas as an example for this. 3) Offer them no matter what rendering quality on Windows devices they can achieve. While horrible Windows rendering this does not apply to mobile app licensing due to better rendering engines and high-resolution displays on most current devices, it's still a large effort for most small foundries. Setting up the products in the e-commerce backend is the smallest part of that. And all that effort is a bet on (currently) a very small possible return. And last but not least, one thing to understand is that most foundries make a huge percentage (60%+) of their money licensing large volumes to bigger companies. One corporate design may include office fonts for 500 workstations. While I personally love selling to small studios and startups that love our work, it's not what pays the bills.

81 points by idan 14y ago

I've been bitten by this licensing problem many times. For some beautiful well-known fonts, fees can be in the 10s of thousands of dollars if you want multiple weights….

shardling 14y ago

Desktop and webfont pricing [for fontspring] is identical, but appfonts are ten times the price! I think the blogger made a mistake here: desktop licenses are per 5 users, web licenses are per 500k page views, but app licenses seem to be for any number. The app license even explicitly states b. Licensee may embed the Font into an unlimited number of copies of the App. (As a tangential aside, why the heck does HN still not have a syntax for blockquoting!?)

atestu 14y ago
You're right, same for web licenses for which you pay per page view.
masklinn 14y ago
> I think the blogger made a mistake here: desktop licenses are per 5 users, web licenses are per 500k page views, but app licenses seem to be for any number. Indeed. So the "mobile" license is equivalent to 50 desktop users or 5 million pageviews in price, but without the limits.
tptacek 14y ago
Another potential difference might be that most (not all) webfont licensing situations involve content that is controlled entirely by the licensee, but app licenses might frequently involve scenarios where the licensee's customers control the content. For instance, Instapaper has effectively obtained a license for typesetting pretty much everything on the Internet in FF Meta.

kanamekun 14y ago

Couldn't agree more! That's why the open font movement is so exciting... some of the fonts available are great: * http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/ http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/ * http://iginomarini.com/fell/the-revival-fonts/ http://iginomarini.com/fell/the-revival-fonts/ * http://www.openfontlibrary.org/ http://www.openfontlibrary.org/ Open fonts are where open source was a decade or so ago... but the trend is already clear.

tptacek 14y ago
There are a few decent open fonts now (and then a whole lot of novelty display faces, and a fair number of knockoffs), but it is unlikely that the "open font movement" is going to displace H+FJ or the like any time soon. As Andrew points out downthread, creating a complete set of hinted fonts for a face is tremendously expensive and time consuming, and for the people with the resources to devote time mastering the craft, there's a functioning market for the work.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  There are a few decent open fonts now (and then a whole lot of novelty display faces, and a fair number of knockoffs), but it is unlikely that the "open font movement" is going to displace H+FJ or the like any time soon. That's an unfortunate example. H&FJ do excellent work, but a lot of people simply can't use it (legally, at least) because of their archaic licensing. You can't use their fonts on the web with @font-face. You can't even embed them in PDFs you're going to distribute, without paying for some mysterious extension to the standard licence. They displaced themselves from those markets, and given that there are now some free web fonts available that are very good by any standards, I suspect H&FJ will never establish themselves in that market in the way they could have. Perhaps from a commercial point of view it doesn't matter to them, if their focus is the high-end, money-no-object-for-our-brand customers that I suspect they rely on for the bulk of their revenues. If you count people like the President of the United States among your customers, I imagine that makes up for quite a few Joe Webmasters.
  - tptacek 14y ago

garrickvanburen 14y ago

This is a huge reason why I currently only use and only recommend using openly licensed fonts (OFL, Apache, etc). The state of openly licensed fonts has significantly improved in the past 3 years.

Hupo 14y ago

There's lots of great free-for-commercial-usage typefaces out there. If you don't already have Fontsquirrel[1] (who also has a fantastic @font-face generator[2]) bookmarked, you should fix that immediately. Google Web Fonts[3] is also another (obvious) resource. [1] http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ [2] http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator [3] http://www.google.com/webfonts http://www.google.com/webfonts Also, while I'm at it, I guess I could name some typefaces I've grown quite fond of: Alegreya, Aller, Cabin, Delicious, Fontin Sans, Lato, Open Sans, PT Sans, Puritan, Quattrocento Sans, Rosario, Source Sans Pro, Ubuntu. All great stuff!

typicons 14y ago

Still, having to inquire about the price of something that my brain perceives as a commodity is jarring. Love this line. http://www.youworkforthem.com http://www.youworkforthem.com offers licensing for mobile apps at checkout. Interestingly, the price difference between eBook and mobile app is the same.

hcarvalhoalves 14y ago

Let me fix the title: "The Sorry State of Typography Licensing" It has always been, and will continue to be, a pain, because the foundries have the same mindset as recording labels, movie studios, etc.

tptacek 14y ago
Yes: that their work, which is simultaneously an incredibly time consuming craft and a luxury good that nobody can reasonably claim a native entitlement to, deserves to be remunerated at rates that the market sets.
- theevocater 14y ago
  I think the point the article is trying to make is that they would make more money if they didn't price out most (perceived) buyers.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    I get the point the article is making, but I think the article is wrong. Just because web nerds don't understand why a good is priced the way it is doesn't make that pricing irrational. You can't even license H+FJ fonts for web applications; they're not even "priced out" - you have to be one of the "cool kids" to use them. H+FJ seems to be doing just fine.
    - Silhouette 14y ago
      You can't even license H+FJ fonts for web applications; they're not even "priced out" - you have to be one of the "cool kids" to use them. So in other words, hcarvalhoalves was right, and the state of typography licensing in general really is a mess.
      - tptacek 14y ago
        No, products not being made available to you on the terms and pricing you demand do not mean the market in which those products are offered is a "mess". The perspective you (and this posting) espouse is profoundly narcissistic.

apaprocki 14y ago

I'd just like to point out that it costs upwards of $1 million USD to design and implement a serious Unicode font from scratch (full TT hinting, all styles/weights, multiple glyph sets). So keep that in mind when referring to licensing fees. The license cost compared to the cost of production is very, very small.

kanamekun 14y ago
Focusing on the high cost of providing a complex product can be dangerous. The theory of disruptive innovation is that many products are overly complex and priced too high. As Clayton Christensen put it, "[D]isruptive innovations ... offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream." [1] In this case, a serious Unicode font with full TT hinting, all styles/weights, multiple glyph sets is seriously over-serving the needs of the mobile app market. I am currently building a mobile app that uses beautiful typography, and open fonts are working wonderfully for me. I don't need any of the extra font features you mentioned; I don't even need bold and italics versions of my fonts for my apps. This form of disruption is called "low-end disruption" and "targets customers who do not need the full performance valued by customers at the high end of the market." [2] Open fonts very much fit that description, and their growth trajectory suggests that they will serve that role well. Over time, the high-end market players tend to get eaten alive by an innovative low-end disruptor who upgrade their offerings and price points. For examples, see Nucor in steel and Toyota in cars. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation#The_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation#The_theor... [2] Christensen, Clayton M. (2003). The Innovator's Solution : Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
antoncohen 14y ago
Can you help me understand that cost? I'm having trouble imagining 10 people getting paid $100k/year, working full-time for a year on a font. The Ubuntu font family is a serious font, it includes 13 fonts covering 1200 glyphes and 200-250 languages. It took about a year to develop. While 10 people might have worked on it in total, it would have been done in phases, not 10 people for a full year. Maybe Canonical did pay a million dollars... did they?

DieBuche 14y ago

You have to consider that it's trivially easy to extract the full fonts from the app the enduser receives. For iOS just unzip the .ipa file, go to the Resources folder et voilà.

hrabago 14y ago
If someone is able and willing to do that, wouldn't that person likewise be able to extract the full fonts from a website using such a font? If so, I'm not sure what your point is.
madewulf 14y ago
I thought that too might prevent foundries to license their fonts, but it turns out that services like typekit are in fact already putting these fonts online, without any real guarantee against pirating. It's just not very convenient to do right now, but definitely doable, as stated by typekit themselves : http://blog.typekit.com/2009/07/21/serving-and-protecting-fonts-on-the-web/ http://blog.typekit.com/2009/07/21/serving-and-protecting-fo... So, if foundries are allowing that on the web, why the special treatment in native apps? That is one of the points of the article.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

tptacek 14y ago

It is hard to imagine something that is less of a "commodity" than a high-end designer font. Literally everyone in the world with a computer or smartphone has numerous highly serviceable fonts at their disposal; if you're looking to license a designer font, the sole rational reason you'd be doing it is to de-commoditize your typesetting.

shiven 14y ago

Love Open Fonts! Wrote my doctoral thesis[0] in LaTeX, typeset in Gentium Plus and other Open SIL fonts[1]. [0] http://escholarship.umassmed.edu/gsbs_diss/562/ http://escholarship.umassmed.edu/gsbs_diss/562/ [1] http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=Gentium http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=Gentium

heddhunter 14y ago

I just went through this exact situation a few days ago. The designer of the app chose Avenir, which is included in iOS 6 but is not part of Android, so I reached out to Linotype to find out how to license it for an Android app. The responses were confusing and inexact (and slow - apparently they only have sales staff in Germany, and I'm in California, so the time difference means every go round takes a whole day). After 2-3 email exchanges I gave up trying to get a coherent answer and we're using a bundled-with-Android font. Oh well!

tblancpain 14y ago

The author is correct that app licensing is in its infancy, just like webfonts licensing was completely unstructured a few years ago. Constructing this as some sort of malicious action of foundries is quite far from the truth, though. In the fairy land of foundries, there's the great and unrivaled king – Monotype – and then there's a thousand princelings with a few princes (Adobe, FontFont) sparkled in between. Type is a TINY market. In a back of the envelope calculation last year, I found that the whole type industry is generating around $120m – $150m in sales every year. Monotype/Linotype is around $50m of that pie already. Adobe Type is another $20m is I recall correctly. FontFont is a private company but I take their overall revenue is something like $10m. Most other foundries are 2 men operations that produce a small profit but not enough to make huge technological investments like hand-hinting the complete back catalog. At that point a foundry has three options: 1) Not offer their catalog for web- and app licensing at all. The respected resellers / foundry VLLG (Village, http://vllg.com http://vllg.com) does this currently, for example. 2) Offer them on request, with the possibility of having a conversation with the customer about their expectations and what they're really getting for their money. See the note in the sidebar on http://commercialtype.com/typefaces/atlas http://commercialtype.com/typefaces/atlas as an example for this. 3) Offer them no matter what rendering quality on Windows devices they can achieve. While horrible Windows rendering this does not apply to mobile app licensing due to better rendering engines and high-resolution displays on most current devices, it's still a large effort for most small foundries. Setting up the products in the e-commerce backend is the smallest part of that. And all that effort is a bet on (currently) a very small possible return. And last but not least, one thing to understand is that most foundries make a huge percentage (60%+) of their money licensing large volumes to bigger companies. One corporate design may include office fonts for 500 workstations. While I personally love selling to small studios and startups that love our work, it's not what pays the bills.