As of Friday, Fontspring has joined the Dribbble and Creative Market family. Our entire Fontspring team is staying in place and we're really excited for what the future holds. You can read more about our acquisition here:
I'm sure there will be many questions and we'll be around to answer what we can.
Comments
I have all the respect in the world for Fontspring. And I appreciate the personal follow-up email from John. However, Dribble obviously has its own interests in mind, which I suspect differs from what we've come to expect. I suppose we'll see over the coming months.
Of course, I'm afraid of any commission rate changes ahead. We've seen that kind of erosion happen with MyFonts after they were purchased by Monotype. But I think they're smart enough to see the appeal of Fontspring and the tradeoff type designers have accepted with Fontspring: less traffic and marketing vs better rates, good foundry communication, and higher embedded license conversions.
I've got high hopes for Creative Market. My revenue is a fraction of what I get elsewhere but I think it's a market segment that's unprospected by the other popular font distributors which is interesting to me. I feel like they're tapping into a certain customer base that eludes most other distributors: a customer who prefers an all-in-one stop for stock photos, clipart, templates, and other non-font products.
For years CM has been accumulating fonts from foundries rejected by Myfonts and allowing pirates to simply rename and post their rip-offs there. Do you really want to have your fonts there?
I'm not a Creative Market apologist (yet) but do have confidence in their leadership to increasingly take the professional type community into consideration. They are in the early stages. They recognized their weakness in the area of type which is why Fontspring was so strategic for them. Maybe I'm naive (yes I am) but I think we have an opportunity to help them get their font-act together.
Your critique is helpful @Die in-dryfoun . Appreciate it.
Creative Market reserves the right to update and change the Agreement from time to time. Reasonable effort will be made to notify Foundry of such changes in accordance with the Notices Section. Keeping your Fontspring account active shall constitute your consent to such changes."
My entire career has been about helping people to unlearn that misconception. Fonts are like architecture. They are far more a product of engineering than design, and simply because they are judged on aesthetics people think they are a design product. Yes, design products are licensed IP and so are fonts, but you don't have to license fonts like IP (and I argue that you shouldn't). To run retail a font business (which is what resellers are) right you basically have to run it like a software company. It starts with little things like, in NY, collecting sales tax because it's software (you don't collect sales tax on graphic design work) to the complexities of software licensing (licensing for static design artwork is much more simple because there's just less you can do with it).
If fontspring stays its own imprint this might work but I doubt it will. They already have fonts on creative market and I think this is primarily a library building purchase, no?
Monotype acquired MyFonts in late 2011. Over a decade now.
MyFonts was, from its inception, the most open of all font sales platforms, kind of the commons of font sales. Although the bar for acceptance is higher than it once was, originally as long as the font could install and didn’t have any obvious kind of infringement going on, it got accepted.
So, pretty much the polar opposite of being “for the ‘big boys,’” whatever exactly that might be intended to mean.
Also, FontFont is a brand of FontShop, which has been owned by Monotype since 2014. Not surprising they would offer their own fonts on their own site.