Any thoughts about Creative Fabrica?

André Simard

Somebody from Creative Fabrica reach me to add my work on their website. It was the first time I heard about that distributor. May I have your thoughts about them? Thank you in advance

Grzegorz Luk (gluk)

"Spotify" model in world of fonts

CreativeFabrica had a separate category "Color fonts", then I found it as a good place to sell my OpenTypeSVG fonts.

they put a lot of emphasis on subscription, so it's getting harder and harder to sell a font if there is an ad for a $1 subscription next to them.

Good place if you believe in the future of the subscription model

Rob Barba

I've been selling there for a while.  Yeah, they make their money off subscriptions, no argument.  But I've been doing pretty well there, and if you do more than just fonts, it's a great way to have a knock on effect: I have a lot of people buying my clipart designs just because they've purchased my fonts in the past.

YMMV, but there are worse places out there.

Ray Larabie

I use it for distributing my free fonts and I make a couple of bucks on referrals. Their traffic is impressive.

André Simard

Thank you all of you for sharing your thoughts.

Simon Cozens

They've been emailing me about once a week asking me to "join as a designer". I've realised two fonts in my life and they're both rubbish. They've obviously been trawling dafonts, and they're behaving like spammers.

Cory Maylett

Simon Cozens said:

They've been emailing me about once a week asking me to "join as a designer".

Yes. Same here. I finally added their address to my junk mail filters.

From what I can tell, they target hobbyists, crafters, and people looking for inexpensive fonts and clip-art sorts of graphics. This is fine, but I have nothing to sell that fits that description, making me wonder how I ended up on their mailing list.

Oliver Weiss (Walden Font Co.)

Hm... I have lots of stuff to sell to that crowd

Ray Larabie

You can call it spamming but I wish the big distributors had some of Creative Fabrica's promotional muscle when it comes those markets. I don't understand why Monotype has several storefronts that seemed to be aimed at nearly identical customers. They could have storefronts that could appeal to customers outside of that scope. At least now, FontSpring and Creative Market will have some decent overlap.

John Butler

Speaking of Monotype and weird downmarket storefronts, Monotype is selling ten fonts for $5 in the Microsoft Windows Store as a “Christmas” font pack, including some rather well-made newer designs like Hesse Antiqua and the recent Walbaum and Sachsenwald revivals.

When you purchase and download them, they get copied into a hidden and “protected” Windows Store apps folder that cannot be accessed or browsed without jumping through a series of insultingly Orwellian security hoops, making it difficult to back them up or check out their extra unencoded glyphs and features in FontLab. I doubt anyone connected with designing or building these actual fonts has the least inkling what the Windows Store does with them.

Mike Wenzloff

The Store fonts are located in the hidden C:\Program Files\WindowsApps folder.
Then the "package name". In my case:
MonotypeImagingInc.MonotypeChristmasFontPack_1.0.0.0_neutral__776bkhgfrgb7p

You need to take ownership of the WindowsApps folder to get there.

WinAero makes an easy to use utility to do this.

John Butler

Thanks, Mike, I took ownership manually and was able to back up the purchase.