Best Of

The type industry is:* Monotype: a company that gobbled up some smaller but important companies, giving it ownership of thousands of old font trademarks, copyrights, and source files. Monotype is als… (View Post)

The type industry—as an industry—is one in which the supply is far greater than the demand. It became this way during the nearly four decades after the democratization of type-making technology in th… (View Post)

Same here. The cheeky twist is that Monotype's customer-repelling tactics over the past few years brought our way plenty of business we wouldn't otherwise get. The flip side of course is that people… (View Post)

I’m not sure how regulation could practically be applied here. Monotype is fairly transparent with their PE-backed leadership, but they have still acquired lots of IP from willing sellers. It’s unfo… (View Post)

They've been wanting to kill off Linotype from quite early on. The first big sign was not letting Linotype.com sell web fonts and only allowing fonts.com to do so. For 3 whole years. Then there was t… (View Post)

The asking price ($4 billion) is not the price of the font IP but a projection of how much profit the company will make over the next few years. If Monotype owned the same number of fonts, but did no… (View Post)

Christine Bateup (of Frere-Jones Type) has a take. (View Post)

Rather than auctioning the company, I think it would be more interesting—and way more fun!—if Monotype’s owners were to auction the font IP, family-by-family, in random order. Let’s find out what’s a… (View Post)

I’ve been thinking this since early this year when they started pushing the new distribution agreement. The terms were so heavily tilted in their favor—especially against competing distributors—that … (View Post)

Glad to hear the Favorites are coming back! (View Post)