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.

Donald Tarallo

I am considering Creative Fabrica and thought that it would be good to look around here on Typedrawers to read what folks have been saying.

The subscription model is interesting. I see on their website that they seem to encourage the conversion of .otf files to web fonts. To me this would seem to discourage one from buying a proper web font license. I don't know if the subscription only model would allow one to upload fonts for conversion to a web font.

Ray Larabie

@Donald Tarallo
Are you talking about Creative Fabrica or Creative Market?

J. Bridges

Buying a license to a font through these types of subscription plans seems problematic and confusing to users. I believe that fonts licensed at Creative Fabrica and Envato subscriptions can no longer be used on new projects once the subscription is cancelled. I have a feeling users will not understand or honor that agreement. If these were activated fonts like the Adobe model it could work. It is a bad idea. But, everyone knows that.

Michael Rafailyk

@Ray Larabie
I have declined all incoming invitations to join them for several reasons:

1. A new platforms like Creative Fabrica, Master Bundles and others are don't specialize on type direction. They sell everything, including fonts. Yes, even Creative Market doesn't allow to sell individual family styles and I don't like it, but they are clearer and traditional in terms of licensing and they have a strong user base.
2. Most of the content I see on Creative Fabrica homepage is just non-professional crafts. Of course, I understand that I am at the very first stage on learning, training my eye, building skills, and finding my own style, I want to say I am exactly not a professional, but even now I do not want to step on this path of selling stuff for just a penny.

On the other hand, I can't sell fonts directly from my website because PayPal still doesn't work in my country for business payments. So indie developers like me are linked to platforms like Monotype. So the decision to refuse such offers is always very complicated.

jilljj

Creative Fabrica does not take responsibility once you submit a font. They were extremely slow (weeks later) answering my question about why I could not (and still can't) access the submission I unfortunately decided to make a few weeks ago. I asked them to return it. Nor are they willing to waver on their Commercial Rights according to their own policies. I found some disturbing conversations (on Reddit in the Etsy section) about the use of possibly stolen art showing up on Etsy (which Etsy is apparently trying to combat by suing). Art that has an originating point of Creative Fabrica (and a response from CF claiming they do not take responsibility for third-party. But I bet they love the money and pod resell part. The fact that Getty images are showing up in AI art (something that CF definitely promotes, puts a whole new spin on the convolution of copyrights also. Too hot to touch perhaps? I'm washing my hands of them and left them with a notification that they may NOT EVER use, sell, redistribute, or give away the submission of a professional hand drawn font made with precision and a 10 star description because I sent MY EULA copyright with it, something they apparently are not willing to negotiate. 
The experience I just had is not one I'd wish on anyone here. I wish I had seen the post here before I submitted, but hopefully this explains what to look out for.