Releasing Cyrillic for an existing Latin family

Kemie Guaida

I recently got in contact with a designer that can help me add Cyrillic to my fonts (I haven't dared so far to do it myself since I have no knowledge of the cyrillic alphabet). These are all existing typefaces currently on sale, so I'm confused as to how to release the Cyrillic. I have several options:

• Just add the Cyrillic to the current font, and sell at the same price, offering more value for the money (and attracting a bigger market)
• Release the complete font (Latin + Cyrillic) as a new family ("Pro"?), for a higher price
• Release a Cyrillic only version (skeptical about this)

Anyone done a similar thing? Any insight or recommendations?

Michał Jarociński

Personally I think that first option is very reasonable. I did this with my latest release. 

Why would you offer cyrillic for a higher price? A pro? You even dont know cyrillic alphabet.  

Most countries that use cyrillic are relatively poor and not interested in spending money on fonts. You propably won't notice any profits from adding cyrillic script. 

But nonetheless it is so fun. You should try it!

George Thomas

I am including Cyrillic at no additional cost. It benefits everyone that way.

Kemie Guaida

Most countries that use cyrillic are relatively poor and not interested in spending money on fonts. You propably won't notice any profits from adding cyrillic script. 

Well, there's also the market of all multinational companies doing business on countries that use cyrillic. Having cyrillic available might be a dealbreaker for some customers, even if it's a small percentage. 

But you're probably right, cyrillic support will probably not make people willing to pay more. They'll just move on to the next font. 

Dyana Weissman

I think you should offer both option 2 and 3. That gives your clients a choice depending on their needs/budget.

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jakob_runge

I have a cyrillic+latin+greek font on the market:
- the pro version and the latin-only version sell quite good.
- the cyrillic-only version sells quite bad. Even greek-only gets licenced more often.
- pro version including cyrilic was a dealmaker for some custom licence deals with bigger companies.

Ray Larabie

Cyrillic is the new extended Latin. There was a time when extended Latin was kind of exotic because most fonts only came equipped with basic accents.  Now, it's shocking if a typeface doesn't come with a reasonable heap of extended Latin. Today on Myfonts, 22% of the typefaces in the Hot 50 include Cyrillic. On Bestsellers, 24%. I've been gradually adding Cyrillic to my old fonts even though I recently halved my prices.

I agree with James about the "Pro" term. That was only relevant two decades ago during the transition from classic PostScript to OpenType. Even 10 years ago, the term had already become ludicrous.

Mark Simonson

I've added Cyrillic to a few of my type families, and when I have, I've kept the price the same. The trade off for my time and effort is a larger potential market. No need to charge extra.

Miles Newlyn

I price a family that had Cyrillic and Greek higher that one with Latin only.

Thierry Blancpain

We offer mostt of our families with Latin only (our standard), and some also additionally as versions with Latin + Cyrillic Extended. We call those versions Pro and they’re more expensive.

The Pro label is not optimal, but we didn’t find a better name to signify the difference between our normal standard character set and the one included in Pro. We also mention Cyrillic in the shop to clarify things. Adding Cyrillic Extended is quite a lot of work for us, and I doubt the sales for supporting Abkhaz or such will ever outweigh the cost of supporting the language, but that’s okay. Pro is about 350 more characters compared to our usual 650. GT Eesti Pro, our next release, currently has 999 glyphs.

Adding Cyrillic offers other benefits like showing what you’re capable of for custom typefaces, and as noted, Cyrillic support can be quite important for larger customers.

Nick Shinn

I use “Pro” to identify OpenType upgrades to older format fonts.

I don’t think it’s ludicrous, as I still haven’t gotten around to upgrading all my older fonts!

My present best-seller is Brown Gothic, published in 1999, and its’s still in the classic PostScript and TrueType formats, with basic Western encoding and no features. People nonetheless find it useful.

When I release the upgrade, very soon, it will be “Pro”, which will clarify the situation for licence holders, who may or may not want to upgrade (they will get a special offer).

This strategy worked very well for my 2012 upgrade of Bodoni Egyptian (also from around 1999).

Ray Larabie

I guess I shouldn't complain about "Pro". 15 years ago, I sold lousy expansions of awful fonts and called them "Deluxe". 

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Kemie Guaida

Thanks for the insight!
I'm leaning towards just adding it to the current family, and hoping increased value=more sales. 

Krista Radoeva

I would encourage not to increase the price. Sure there are international brands that might pay more for language support, but the regular user doesn't expect to pay more for using their native script. And most local foundries don't charge differently. A ‘Pro’ should be more than just Standard Cyrillic.

Also, there is absolutely no point in a Cyrillic only font. In Russian, Bulgarian and other Cyrillic languages, you often need to use at least Basic Latin, for words which are not transliterated, most commonly brands or company names.

Max Phillips

"XXL"

Nick Shinn

The basic Cyrillic encoding (1251) includes a very basic Latin character set, with no accents—good enough for English.

Deleted Account

I think Pro, is a great term for the people who use it, but otherwise, it's useless. Are not Nick's customers who upgrade forced to recompose their documents? That is Not an upgrade to me. Pro, is a term of specific meaning to each designer, as Nick proves, and as such, I think it is lacking in some important respects. 

Nick Shinn

The documents don’t recompose, because the metrics are the same. 
All that’s required is to remove the old fonts, install the new, and change the font names in live documents.

Isn’t it more confusing for businesses to have different versions of a font, with the same name, in their documents and workflow?