Trial LicenceWhat do others think of this? Is this the way things are headed? (Grilli Type, Swiss Typefaces and Milieu Grotesque have been offering partial trials for a while now — seems to be a Swiss thing!)
Free
End-User Licence
From £15 per font style for one user
Webfont Licence
£48 per font style per domain name for 1 year
£480 per font style per domain name, perpetual
App Licence
£48 per font style per app for 1 year
£480 per font style per app, perpetual
Unlimited Licence
£9,375 per font style for an unlimited number of users within your organization
"The reality of the graphic design world is that fonts are distributed amongst designers for free. When a designer begins work on a specific project they often end up emailing all their buddies to track down a copy of a specific font so that they can play with it. If they like it and end up using it, then the designer will most likely suggest their client purchase the font. This is a reality that Dalton Maag embraced with the idea of releasing trial copies for all their fonts for free," he says.…
Method and Dalton Maag say the new licensing options were influenced by digital music services such as iTunes and Spotify. Lahdesmaki says he hopes the trial font and new licensing options on the site "will fundamentally challenge and change the typography design industry, much in the same way that the music industry changed with the arrival of MP3s."
Comments
It's just a marketing strategy that seems to work because blogs have picked up on it.
We at fatype have been offering free trials as well. swisstypefaces deserve the credit for coming up with that (AFAIK). I think it's a great idea, but it also depends on the foundry, its market, its strategy and its fonts. There is not one strategy that will work for everybody.
The big move there is offering full free trials.
But they are right, many graphic designers already get full trial fonts from their friends anyway.
The rest doesn't sound particularly special. Nor cheap (which is good).
15£ is for one user. A desktop font for 3 users (most foundries offer 3-5 users as default) costs 36£ or 58$.
Dropping traffic stats for webfonts is simpler but annual licensing is not. A bakery that wants to run its website for 5 years will end up paying more with that model than with a perpetual license based on traffic (plus the hassle or renewal). So it mostly profits the biggest clients, which is where the money's at. That sounds like a loss to me. Why should a small client pay the same as a big one for webfonts, but a lot less for desktop?
PS: I've used my twitter handle as username. Open enough I think. If not please delete my account. I don't see why people should find industry forum posts when they google my name.
I think their trial fonts are definitely a step in the right direction though. Font piracy is a reality and anybody who thinks they can somehow relieve their own company of that by cracking down on it harder than others is silly. We optimize for our paying customers, and the last few years have shown that ease of use and customer-friendly solutions win out. If you’re not H&Co and can’t invest hundreds of thousands into a custom solution, it’s just not worth it to even try.
And yes, it’s weird that mostly Swiss foundries seem to do trials. I agree with Yassin that Swiss Typefaces deserves credit for coming up with the trial fonts model.
I’m not sure what things you’re talking about that are easy to do and do not inconvenience your customers. Bricking webfonts for desktop usage goes against what we allow in our EULA (which is, specifically, using webfonts during the design process in Photoshop / etc.). Asking for htaccess stuff makes the fonts super hard to use for technically less experienced users, people on hosted platforms, etc. I just don’t see what we’d do to have an actual effect on piracy that wouldn’t strongly inconvenience our customers.
But you’re right – the two things are of course not mutually exclusive. I just chose not to spend my limited time on it.
Jackson, if you want more foundries to combat disrespect of monopoly rights, perhaps you could describe here what these simple, easy things are. I'm sure it would make a great presention at a few type conferences too
Personally I assume everything I write will be found by someone, but we have lost some valuable voices because of the Real Names requirement. Perhaps James could make TypeDrawers invisible to search engines and we could get them back? Or at least have a private forum with looser requirements.
I think I raised a reasonable reason for why I don't want to participate with my real full name. I understand the desire to avoid anonymous trolls, on the other hand anonymity on the internet allows people to express their real ideas freely, without fear of repercussions from their bosses, clients, etc. It is not as simple for everyone to "stand by your comments", it really depends your situation. An employee from corporation-foundry X might refrain from posting here because it might have negative impact on his career. Therefore this policy could prevent the expression of other point of views.
Anyway, this has been discussed before and what I think was a reasonable solution such as generic Names for non-members – or invisible messages to non-members – have been dismissed, meaning the position for real names is firm. I respect that and certainly don't expect any special treatment.
Feel free to ban me again then
Best,
Y
Font Smith just launched a new site and new licencing model