Launch Timing

Hrant H. Papazian

I've long been curious to figure out what are good and bad times of the year to launch typefaces.

Any insights?

George Thomas

I think that would be highly dependent upon the face and its intended use. One size does not fit all in the case of fonts.

Russell McGorman

I think how you position them in your posters, ads and promotions could be linked to a time of year ("back to school sale for design students"?) .

Or, perhaps, anticipating the timeline to develop advertising for seasonal events might make sense. 

Arthur Reinders Folmer

I picked september. After most holidays, before the rest. Hope it's a good time!

For the rest: I think a each period can bring some advances: For something scripty or ornate (if it's Latin that is!) a month or two before New Years, right on time for the real usage. For something neutral and workhorsey the coming month, since then most mayor corporations will start their reporting design. (which quite often will spark rebrands)

And for the rest: It all falls in between, although there is definitely a lull in new design projects starting during the summer months. If you launch a typeface in those periods, your typeface might sooner end up in the inspiration folder, and perhaps forgotten when it's time to choose!

JoyceKetterer

I tend to think the important variable is where your customers are.  For folks like us who have a global customer base with the largest block (but still under 50%) in the US it's January.  

This is because the ideal is to have a few uninterrupted months where the font can get some momentum.  September is less than ideal because people are catching up from summer in the first month and you really only get October before Americans have Thanksgiving and the everyone is scrambling for the end of the year plus taking off for Xmas and New Years.

Launching in January means you get 5ish uninterrupted months where the majority of the customer base is just working (not closing out the year or prepping for a holiday or whatever).

That said, you will notice that we didn't launch Halyard in January but instead in May - along with 5 other foundries that week.  The best laid plans....  Ultimately, the best time to launch is when the font is done - with the exception of July and August when you shouldn't launch.

AbrahamLee

Is there ever a consideration for when users/companies are likely to have more expendable funds? For example, before the end of year holidays (Black Friday?) or maybe in the first quarter when bumps in salaries + bonuses happen?

George Thomas

Most companies, at least well-run ones, have budgets to allow for salaries, etc. Software would have its own account. Also, certain fonts might be part of a client budget. Numerous variables at work here so it's hard to pin down.

Hrant H. Papazian

@JoyceKetterer Thanks for sharing!

Ray Larabie

Font distributors take longer to launch fonts in July and August. If you launch in August, there's a good chance it won't be released until September. Also, I imagine a lot of type designers hold off on releasing summer projects until September to avoid those slow sales months. The result is that in the first couple of weeks in September, there'a a deluge of new font releases so that's a good time for your new release to get lost in the crowd.

JoyceKetterer

@AbrahamLee When you're talking about a company of any size, fonts are not an impulse buy.  A branding change is a very big deal, undertaken after a long slow deliberation and requiring a great deal of effort to implement.  This is why the conventional wisdom is that it takes 2 years for a font to really sell.  You can't time a font release the way you time consumer electronics.  Instead, you release it at a time when customers aren't in a frenzy and can notice it, you do what you can to keep it in their line of sight, and you wait.

JoyceKetterer

@George Thomas I think that when you talk about a "software" account you're talking about an expense line item.  Fonts can be an expense (if it is for a marketing campaign) but as often as not it's a capital expense (branding) and that tends to be the big ticket sales from our perspective.  

Hrant H. Papazian

@JoyceKetterer To be clear: you're saying that the big money is in corporate branding, and that's slow enough to make release timing moot?

This brings to mind another question:
Don't corporations avoid branding using a retail font that's been around for a while?

Marc Oxborrow

Hrant, when the company I worked for rebranded (twice in about 5 years, due to a merger), we went with retail fonts from a prominent type designer. While distinctiveness has value, it's just one of the considerations when choosing a corporate font. Price, language support, aesthetic suitability and licensing options are equally, if not more, important.

JoyceKetterer

@Hrant H. Papazian that's not what I was trying to convey.   

Timing is definitely something to think about, as I said in my first post.  It's just not like you can release on black Friday and get a lot of sales by Christmas - at least in my experience.  

Perhaps there are some fonts which really are consumer goods but for anyone who's asking this question and also talking about large companies I can definitely say they aren't.  I'd be curious to know what @Dave Crossland  has to say about this.  I'd not be surprised at all if you get some sort of blackfriday-type effect with Google fonts - which are free to the user.  

Speaking about Halyard, a January release is not the difference between success or failure - which is why we didn't wait for the next January to come around.  However, had we made the January release I'm certain we would have shortened the lead time before it starts paying back our investment in it.  Bad timing just means the font will take longer to get up to speed on sales. 

@Hrant H. Papazian to your second question, I agree with Marc...  This is not really an issue in our experience.  We get a great deal of license purchases for branding that are straight retail even of fonts that have been available to the public around 10 years.  The other thing that happens with some frequency is that we get a request for a custom font from someone who thinks as you suggest but can be talked out of it once we explain how long that will take.  Remember, most people just have no idea how long it takes to make a font.  Those folks can usually be talked into an existing font with modifications - which I count as a sale of that font in our books.

Kent Lew

Ultimately, the best time to launch is when the font is done - with the exception of July and August when you shouldn't launch.

Or December.

JoyceKetterer

@Kent Lew  you make a strong point but I hesitate to lump December in with summer.  The thing about December is that we do always see a jump in traffic in the first half because there are definitely companies that are closing out the fiscal year and need to make purchases.  That's a massive contrast to the deadness of summer.  If you release in December you will get SOME eyeballs.  Plus, you're not likely to be one of many foundries releasing that week/day which definitely sucks.  So, less than ideal but not the black hole of July and August. The proximity to January (resulting in a low cost to wait) makes me want to agree with you and put a red X over it but I'm going to stop just short of that.

Kent Lew

Fair enough. First week or so can work. General wisdom and experience at Font Bureau, though, was that December releases were disadvantaged. We might release an expansion, because that was often aimed more at existing customers who were predisposed to pay attention. But not something new and exciting.

JoyceKetterer

@Kent Lew I'm not endorsing releasing in December.  Just not saying it's as bad as August.  Probably I'm still feeling burned from 5 other releases the same week as Halyard.  We got only a day of buz.  From where I sit a slower week even in a less desirable month might have been better

Thierry Blancpain

To add to the existing knowledge shared here, to a certain degree all of it is moot in our current environment where it’s pretty rare for an uneventful week in U.S. and even world news. And you obviously can’t time for that. You probably won’t get a full week of attention either way.

In that sense, making releases that create medium- to long-term interest due to their actual design and presentation is much more important than the exact day or week you pick.

Hrant H. Papazian

FWIW, in the sales figures of FF Ernestine (which launched in December of 2011) there's been a distinct spike in Quarter 2 sales... My only explanation is that schools like Ernestine, and they have to spend their money before Summer. But who knows.

Dave Crossland

I think Thierry Blancpain is spot-on. I've always published typefaces as soon as I was able to, with a couple of exceptions recently made recently where faces were released at specific type events, like Typographics (Space Mono in 2016, Spectral in 2017.) That's more about the event than the typeface

I would say that December and August, being summer and winter holiday months in the West, are obviously not ideal time to release anything that isn't specifically useful for either holiday. You see this in stuff like this graph of general interest in fonts on Google Search:



– https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today 5-y&q=fonts

There is a steep drop at Christmas time, and there is a peak around valentines day (a lot of people need fonts to make their own romantic graphic designs, I guess and then this slides down to the July 4 summer holiday in the US, and then trends up to Thanksgiving, and then down to the Christmas drop again. 

This is somewhat a different topic, but interestingly I've seen that, over the long term, it seems interest in fonts has trended down in the last 20 years. Here's the long view on Google Trends is from 2004 to today:



– https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=fonts 

The longest view is provided by the Google Books n-gram search, where use of the word "fonts" exploded in the mid 80s (with DTP) and peaked in the early 1990s. The word "typefaces" traces a similar although more muted path (and in the above doesn't even register) 



– https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fonts,typefaces&year_start=1970&year_end=2017&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1;,fonts;,c0;.t1;,typefaces;,c0

Despite these declines, the "font economy" has only grown, though

Hrant H. Papazian

@Dave Crossland Nice stuff, Dave, thank you! Would it be possible to see such graphs for Google fonts?

Mark Simonson

Dave: Would it matter if you search "font" rather than "fonts"? Checked: It does change; the line flattens around 2009, not so much declining.

John Hudson

Dave: 

This is somewhat a different topic, but interestingly I've seen that, over the long term, it seems interest in fonts has trended down in the last 20 years. Here's the long view on Google Trends is from 2004 to today.

I wouldn't equate frequency in Google search terms as a straight equivalence with 'interest'. If we look at what has happened during this period in terms of the concentration of font distribution channels and the success of those channels in marketing themselves, it's possible that fewer people are searching for 'fonts' because they've already figured out where they go to find fonts.

Mark Simonson

Also, this is interesting (singular rather than plural on the book search):

Dave Crossland

Hrant H. Papazian said:

@Dave Crossland Nice stuff, Dave, thank you! Would it be possible to see such graphs for Google fonts?

This is all public data and I linked the sources under the images

Hrant H. Papazian

@Dave Crossland Does that mean No?  :-)

Dave Crossland

It means anyone can look for themselves

Johannes Neumeier

Mark Simonson said:

Also, this is interesting (singular rather than plural on the book search)

You can combine those hits by appending wildcard * or _INF.

Also, comparing the decrease in "font" and simultaneous increase in "typeface" to their combined total shows that it might be the terminology shifting from the DTP age "font" to the more distinguished "typeface" term, without an actual decline in the volume of the results.

While it does inform to the purchase timing, all in all this says little about the industry as a whole.

Hrant H. Papazian

January got back.

https://twitter.com/BadsonStudio/status/953415698427990017

Deleted Account

Dave: “This is somewhat a different topic, but interestingly I've seen that, over the long term, it seems interest in fonts has trended down in the last 20 years.”

How does that line come to represent “interest” going down as opposed to “confusion”, e.g.?