Identifont – best practise?

Andreas Stötzner
Andreas Stötzner Posts: 798
in Type Business
I have received a rather blunt request from Identifont to hand over a bunch of my fonts. I hesitate to do so.

Do you supply font files to them? Any experiences, insights, best practise?
All recommendations welcome.

Comments

  • Florian Hardwig
    Florian Hardwig Posts: 273
    Hi Andreas,

    As a font user and font identifier, I’m a frequent visitor of the Identifont website, and find it provides an invaluable service. It’s one of only a few (nearly) comprehensive and vendor-agnostic font resources we have.

    The site is run by David Johnson-Davies, a gentleman from Cambridge, England, whom I was lucky to meet once. I found him very courteous and anything but blunt, so I blame e-mail as a medium for your experience.

    Here’s some additional info from the Identifont website:
    Foundries and designers have been extremely supportive in providing samples of their fonts for use by us in adding the information to Identifont. We do the work of training the expert system and creating the character-set GIF sample images ourselves, to ensure accuracy and consistency. 

    […] we receive commission from some of the font publishers and vendors on sales resulting from referrals from Identifont. Note that we don't exclude foundries who don't pay commission, but we give those that do a higher ranking in the list.

    Their Submit page lists the benefits for font publishers of being included in Identifont.

    I understand that not everyone is comfortable with providing font files. For what it’s worth, my understanding is that the font files don’t end up on the web server – only the static images are shown online.

    Hope this helps!
    Herzliche Grüße, Florian

  • Johannes Neumeier
    Johannes Neumeier Posts: 380
    They seem to include an image with a default charset of the font. If you are concerned about where the files end up you can minimize your exposure by supplying only a subset font matching those characters usually shown in the preview.
  • JoyceKetterer
    JoyceKetterer Posts: 813
    They contacted us last year.  The request for the files gave me pause too but I eventually gave them a limited license.  I think the benefit of being on a well respective list outweighs any risk.  
  • Andreas Stötzner
    Andreas Stötzner Posts: 798
    thank you all for your helpful comments!

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