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Hi, quoting for fonts is a tricky one. Increasingly, I see people who charge 7k (US$) per weight. There is no way you can make a living from that. Consider that it will take you approx 150 hours per weight, including some initial concept work, if you want to do a good job. You will find that you're working at 46US$ per hour. If you are self employed that does not pay for the bills these days.

You must also think beyond the cost of simply drawing letters in your font program. Your work goes beyond that. You must factor in font engineering and possibly hinting, particularly, if you work for a corporate client, and you must factor in potential support time that you will inevitably incur. IMO, I think that a price of around US$ 20-25k per weight is appropriate for a Western European glyph set (ANSII), giving the client three years exclusivity. If they want to own the rights, double the price.

If they think that you're too expensive and argue that they can have lots of fonts for 'free' from other sources then tell them to go to hell.

Bruno

Dave, Pablo, Vernon —

By any objective measure of success in the type-design world — name recognition, users, revenue — the three of you are already ahead of 90% of people who identify as participants in the type business. So your boundless appetite for argument on this topic is mystifying. Nobody is stopping you from earning a living any way you like. If not everyone agrees with the libre-font business model, so what? Type designers disagree with each other all the time. Yet everyone in the type business has a common goal: to find a way to take this topic we're irrationally interested in and turn it into a few bucks. If you've found a method that works, that's great. But isn't that enough? Why is it also necessary to enter the agora and browbeat your colleagues? Perhaps it's time to take the high road and let your success speak for itself. If not, it shouldn't surprise you when others think you look like sore winners. Or shit-stirrers.

I agree that the discussion of individual designs isn't relevant to this discussion, which is why I was sort of surprised by Dave's interjection re. News Gothic and Source Sans. My point was that where he sees similarity, someone else sees difference, and it is differentiation in design that, all else being equal, carries value.
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I think you go rhetorically off the deep end, Vernon, when you start equating Libre with 'joining the Internet age'. It's this sort of talk that sometimes gives the impression that you and Dave are pushing kool-aid. There's nothing antithetical to 'the Internet age' in a software ecosystem that includes restrictive licensing as well as open licensing, and it isn't necessary for fonts to be able to go everywhere in order for them to go where they need. Open licensing is a business decision that is appropriate to specific kinds of services and operations. As I've said a few times in this thread now, understanding those business decisions and why, for those clients, they make sense, is important. I don't think that understanding is much aided by free software ideologues, who tend to alienate a lot of people.

Why not draw a few non-serious faces first? Every few months someone tells me that they're inspired to get into designing fonts. They want to start with their masterpiece. It's always a large family of text fonts with true italics with Greek, Cyrillic & Vietnamese. It'll have old-style numerals, proportional lining numerals, proportional old-style, small caps and on and on. But you learn from mistakes. If you've already made 24 weights of a lowercase a, plus accents, you're less inclined to change it. Mistakes are how you learn.

Maybe an all caps display font might seem like a boring cop-out but you'd be surprised what you can learn.

You don't have to make sketches to make a font. You don't even have to have a plan. Or you can have a detailed plan, draw it all out ahead of time. I usually design from one letter outward and then later discard/replace that seed letter. I don't have a sketch, I have a purpose in mind . . . a manifesto of what the font's job is. Each letter has to serve the main purpose and harmonize with the other letters. As I create each letter, I'm testing it in words until it feels like it belongs. I learned this technique from doing those stupid rock band logo fonts in the 1990's. That's why I think it's important to play with less serious fonts . . . it;s a discovery thing.

You can be inspired by other font designers, but also look outside type design. Jimi Hendrix imitated horn players to get his unique sound, not just other guitarists. I'd avoid getting too much information from other font designers because the whole industry is eating it's own tail. But typographers - listen to what they have to say. They're the ones who have to deal with the mistakes we make.

If sketching doesn't feel like your thing, don't take that route. For years, I've seen people on font forums struggling with font designs because they tried to make something look like their sketch. For example, they'll draw a fancy lowercase g and then struggle to make it harmonize with the other letters instead of designing a font and later designing a g that suits it.

There's the "going rate" / "proper compensation" argument. Really murky waters to wade into. The $2 cup of coffee in Missoula costs $10 in Vienna. The $10 paperback in New York City costs $18 in London. The $1 bottle of water in Halifax costs $8 in Dubai. The $14 music CD in Boston costs $23 in Brisbane. So, whose going rate and where? Google is a global internet company, and in a global context the "going rate" argument disintegrates pretty quickly. We as type designers especially should try not to go there, even within a same-field context rather than a global one, because we know better just by looking at our own industry. When I propose something like a "going rate", I may sound like I have an inside track to some kind of known arrangement within the type industry, but I would really be misleading people into thinking there's some kind of standard for font development payouts. There isn't. In fact, it's so ridiculously arbitrary: I know a studio that wanted to charge $6K simply for modifying the naming tables of a font they'd already produced for their client, another studio that charges what I would consider an arm and a leg for a simple format conversion, and another studio where the minimum charge for custom work is equivalent to two years' worth of average mortgage payments in downtown Edmonton. All the power to them, and nice work if they can get it, but let's not kid ourselves or try to fool each other about what we do and how we do it. We all know this about our own industry, so why do I feel like I'm pointing out the pink elephant? If there is no coercion or questionable ethic/legality between parties who agree on a price for something, why are we eager to impose moral judgment on the transaction? How can we propose that David agreeing to a certain sum per unit is exploitation by Goliath, and not consider that Goliath agreeing to a much larger sum per unit may actually be exploitation by David?

Another murky path the "going rate" argument winds up is the "quality work" supposition. This volley gets thrown around all the time. It is very demonstrable that higher payouts have nothing to do with better quality — and we all certainly know this from experience, since our work is essentially providing functionality solutions which are not completed until they are indeed functional to the satisfaction of whoever asked for them. Whenever I hear the "quality" argument, my first thought is the person uttering it must be running out of ways to back up a position, so it's time to drop some ambiguity in the pot. The quality argument is mostly bullshit. On many occasions I've had to fix outlines and kerning in fonts I licensed from some of the most non-turd-like reputable developers out there, just to be able to personally use them. This becomes more obvious as time passes, as the perception/definition of quality changes year after year. Outside the realms of PR and marketing, a quality font is simply a font the user is satisfied with using. When users are not provided such satisfaction, they usually are vocal about it, especially in this gigantic echoey bowl we call the internet. To me, when a type designer calls another type designer's work "quality" into question, it just sounds like competition is frustrating someone and causing them to be reactionary.

It's interesting to watch the Google webfonts thing unfold. It's mostly irrelevant to what I do personally or professionally, but overall it seems to have generated more interest in typography in general. At least people of all ages and all walks of life are now paying attention to fonts and how they work. And I think we all know that once bitten by that particular bug there is no looking back, and the worse you're hooked, the more you learn and the better you get. If there are any future speculations I have about this, they would probably be along optimistic lines. We are finally seeing the end of the Western European / North American stranglehold on global type design, now that many Latin American and Eastern European gems are out there. Elsewhere in the world, too. Arabic fonts are now being designed by actual Arabs, Cyrillic fonts by actual Russians and Bulgarians, etcetera, people who actually read and write those scripts. Who would have thought? Every passing year brings a record number of type designers and type users. Some of us may worry about increasing competition and the pie being sliced too thin, but think of what it means for world typography in general. I'm very glad the arcane craft that enchanted me for so long is now blazing a path into the mainstream. Sometimes in a bad way until people learn the subtleties, but still, it's the mainstream, the big show!

Vernon:

And then the big question is why do type designers accept these systems of font delivery that allow such easy theft of their designs?

I think the answer to that goes back to standards. When Adobe launched PS there was encryption and no one could steal fonts without a bunch of really smart programmers. The disadvantages of their system to the legal user were substantial, and I suspect the cost of soothing these users when encryption ran amok was difficult to support. Nevertheless, when I was invited to participate in the discussions to finalize TT 1.0, I asked for an encryption option for TT. When asked to explain, I said the option would allow corporations to develop and protect their own. Open font formats, I reasoned, gave everyone the chance to design fonts, allowing libre, academic and corporate development. But open did not have to mean what it has become. The format could be published while an option within that format allowed the developer to create an interpreter-specific encryption.

As you might guess, the answer was no. But the reason given, in 1990 or so, was time. They didn't have time in that version. Not that I'm waiting. So, be very clear in your thinking if you can; the array of proposals; .webfont, permissions table, etc were not made to protect fonts, like my TT 1.0 proposal. And no one expects woff to protect fonts either. The next barrier is law. Theft does not mean ownership. There are no squatter's rights for software where one secretly stashes fonts for 7 years, then gets to use them in a national ad campaign in year 8. And TV, print and signage leave font tracks. These are harder to find than on the web.

I realign this now in the context of your issue of individual and small foundries, who are being squeezed so much that they probably feel little choice but to sign contracts that, in return for % royalties, leave their webfonts exposed to easy theft. Everyone in the typographic arts makes an Achillean choice between analog and digital when they publish. If they chose analog publication; tattoos, sign paintings, stone cut type or calligraphy, they will by and large live locally, and probably peacefully, be locally loved and for the most part locally remembered. Time distorts this, and the best analog artists do get remembered. But only the best, and usually long after they are no longer aware, much less benefit.

The other choice, being digital publishing, comes with all kinds of stuff we all are caterwauling through as we write. You say people sign contracts that, in return for % royalties, leave their webfonts exposed to easy thefts — are surrendering. But signing a contract in return for nothing, leaving your webfonts to only benefit others is not surrendering, bending over, or anything but heroism. I think, as I wrote, this must be a generational thing.

I think we need to distinguish unlicensed font use by people who want everything for free, so will pirate rather than purchase font licenses, from that by people who want to test drive fonts before committing to buying them. The former is a hopeless case that no amount of good will or generosity on the part of font makers will positively change; this kind of pirate was all over alt.binaries.fonts in 1993 and every warez site, forum and sinkhole since. The latter is a business opportunity that we've mostly failed to come up with a good way to address for the past twenty years: how to make it legitimate for designers to test drive fonts to the comp stage, without this being abused, while ensuring that generated value is partaken of by the people who make the fonts. This last point is important, because if a design agency uses fonts in comps to get a job, it isn't only the font they end up using for the project -- often months down the line, often not even one of the fonts used in the original bid work -- that contributes to the financial benefit they derive.

Recently, we've seen the introduction of reasonable looking test drive mechanisms, which if widely adopted by font makers would in theory completely remove the justification for any unlicensed font use in such scenarios. The problem with such mechanisms just now, though, is that the biggest of them are linked to subscription software models that may ultimately be more damaging to the livelihood of individual type designers than the unlicensed font use they aim to reduce. As with so much of the topics of speculation in this thread, WE DON'T KNOW.

Ray, I agree that pirated fonts & software can help build demand for properly licensed fonts & software, and that the RIAA's methods do not constitute a wild success we should all be emulating. But I have a hard time picturing the people who frequent pirate sites caring much about subtle, incremental enhancements of typographic quality, even if they knew (and how would they know?) that they could have a later, more refined version of the face they're about to steal, if only they were willing to pay for it.

Of course, there's the separate problem of designers who do care about their work and about typographic quality, but who think they're being good neighbors when they share the fonts they license. And maybe they would care that the new version of X has some nifty improvements. But that wouldn't stop them sharing round the old one. I don't think this is winnable. I've had earnest conversations with friends of mine who have offered me free typefaces, explaining that by so doing, they're hurting people like me. I don't think they walked away thinking, "I shouldn't share fonts anymore. It's wrong." I think they walked away thinking, "I shouldn't share fonts with Max anymore. He gets weird about it."

The only model that seem to make sense to me is to assume that a certain portion of the market for your typefaces is just not going to pay for them, and that you need to work to make your overall market big enough that you can get by on the legitimate portion. If a lot of people are stealing your fonts, that probably means a lot of them are paying for them, too.