MyFonts and families

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Comments

  • Nick ShinnNick Shinn Posts: 2,131
    Corel users weren’t the professional graphic designers who constituted the market for quality fonts at that time.

    Here are the freebies which were bundled with Illustrator in 1993.

    Perhaps it was a response to other players (including Apple), but I suspect that the applications departments at Adobe didn’t realize they were negatively impacting the type department, and were enthralled by the idea that suddenly they no longer had to cram their apps onto floppies, but had CDs with lots of empty space on them, and that filling it with free fonts would enhance the user experience. 


  • I read through the entire thread before running into the last three posts from Nick and Thomas that say what I've thought for some time now.

    As a graphic designer myself, I work with, hire and have lots of friends who are also graphic designers. They seldom specifically buy fonts, yet every last one of them has a collection that often amounts to hundreds or thousand of fonts they've picked up over the years. 

    It's usually a rag-tag assortment of old Type 1 stuff and whatever came with their computers or their software programs or was "borrowed" from their last jobs where fonts were traded with little regard for piracy issues. When they need something different from what they already have, they head to a free download site and get something that works for the project at hand.

    As far as these designers are concerned, font are (or should be) free. Quality to them means whatever looks OK at the moment and successfully makes it through the output RIP. Since actually buying fonts means haggling with their employer or passing along the costs to clients, it's easier to use what they already have or can round up for free (legally or otherwise).

    It's not all that different from the music recording business — why spend $10 for a CD with only nine or ten songs when everything you want is a few seconds away on Spotify for only $10 per month? I guess the bottom line is I'm not at all surprised that font prices are dropping. Sadly, I'm surprised that any of us are still able to make anything but pocket change from the online font distributors.
  • Chris LozosChris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    Whatever is painless to steal, quickly descends in value to the point that it is assumed they are free. We can hope that enough customers still view type with value greater than "whatever looks OK".  Now only if things like housing, food, medical care, transportation, etc.., would catch up to the depleted value of "fonts", we might all still be able to live from our work.
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