This is related to a discussion in the
hot takes thread. I thought some of you might find my current opinion on free fonts interesting considering my notoriety in the free font realm.
I'm no longer producing new free typefaces and am not including free styles in my new families. I used to use free fonts as a marketing tool. They got attention from young designers or designers without font budgets. Some of that resulted in future sales of non-free fonts and embedding licenses. I don't regret doing that and it worked out great for me. I understand how many of you think this practice was degrading the marketplace and I'm certain it did. There were some good and bad aspects to it. On one hand, it allowed more typeface choices for people who couldn't purchase fonts. On the other hand, it made pay fonts seem less appealing. I understand and accept the disdain they got from established typeface designers in the last quarter century, but that's not why I've stopped.
Free fonts are no longer an effective marketing tool. Most free font releases are ignored. I often see free font releases on Twitter getting almost no retweets. On Reddit, free font announcements receive little response. Distributors have been transitioning away from free fonts. MyFonts went from embracing free fonts in the 2000s to banning unaccompanied free fonts in the 2010s to penalizing visibility of typeface containing free styles in the 2020s. Creative Market doesn't allow free fonts outside of promotions. Fonts.com and FontSpring still allow unaccompanied free fonts but that may not last long. I doubt the younger generation is using Dafont/1001fonts as much as previous generations did. Google has their own free font ecosystem which I refuse to get involved in so I can't speak to whether that scene is worthwhile.
There's a "personal use" free fonts scene that I dislike but maybe someone can tell us why this is a viable tactic or not.
In terms of using free fonts as a marketing tool, apart from closed ecosystems, I'm declaring the free fonts scene dead.
Comments
I'd like to see Google as font vendor one day. That would probably shake things up a bit in any way.
But there are situations, or attitudes where some creators prefer to offer their work for free. This has always existed.
It is my case. I'm not a professional font designer. Nor a designer, in fact.
Just a retired headmaster, with a 40 years old passion for typefaces and 30 for type design.
I'm designing fonts because I like imagining new ones or digitizing old ones, because I like to "play" with the Fontlab softwares, and because I think my work on fonts is not too bad.
Of course, I'm working on my own, so I'm not able to produce "universal" fonts, like the big font companies.
Not pretending to be "original", I try however to be as creative as possible, not imitating existing fonts. And certainly not re-inventing the wheel, like the bunch of "new" writing fonts, only slightly different from the existing ones.
This is the reason why I distribute my fonts for free on daFont. Even for very small businesses asking me to use the font in their small project, for teachers as part of their paedagogical work, etc.
I respect the professionals and certainly those who make us all progress with their help or advice.
But I'm still a typedrawer.
I don’t see how free fonts can get around those cons in principle, so as long as type designers can offer a better product, the market is fine.
But if you are picking up “free fonts” from DaFont, using them for commercial work, and not worrying about the license? Well, yes, there are risks.
Then again, honestly, retail fonts often have surprising license terms. Just paying for a font does not mean you are “safe” from surprises.
2. They get the fonts on their computers, so chances they will use it for a commercial project are higher.
3. They make free ads and spread the word on social media (which is the point of most ‘personal’ projects)
4. Of course, your font will appear in the search results more often. Yes, it’s a dirty clickbait, but it seems like people are used to it by now: any decent ‘free font’ is free for personal use only.
The biggest con is of course that your font will end up on every freebies website without proper crediting and license info.
As a result, I'm very conscious of the need for free fonts for comic letterers, especially in the indie and webcomic/webtoons side of things. Not everyone is a DC/Marvel/Image/et al. who can buy fonts at will for their letterers; some are guys who rely heavily on, say, Blambot's free fonts for dialogue and effects.
Having been there, I get that. I know everyone's not going to be like me, dissatisfied with the variety of fonts and figuring "I can do that!" and thus get into fontmaking; other people may not have that interest or they want to refine other parts of their work. Thus, I try to make my free fonts available for personal use for that reason. I get that someone who might want a free font and can't afford Inkslinger (which I'll be using personally for a future revival of one of my old series), but maybe they'll be happy with Red State, Blue State or even VTC Letterer Pro. And hopefully, down the line, that will translate to future font sales out of goodwill (and it has, to be honest.)
And it's not just comics. I recently did (by request of a Reddit user) an "accurate" rendition of an album font and gave it out for free. I didn't feel it was valid to charge for it (not to mention that it's one of those "sucks on purpose" fonts), but he was happy with it and ended up paying me for a license that wasn't really necessary so he could use it on his fansite. Likewise, a Youtuber using a free version of a font that I'd expanded into a full pay font (though I kept the original one out there free for personal use) found out that I had an expanded version, ponied up for a license for the updated one.
So, ultimately, it does work, but it's a long tail sort of thing.
I should point out, however, that despite the above, I don't disagree with your overall point; my next font is actually going to be a comics-based font and it's going to be a complete pay one, not free.
Is it common for comics to be made for personal use—not published, distributed or displayed online?
IMO, this would help fit the definition of personal use, though one could argue "indie use" as well - YMMV.
(As an amusing follow-on, given where you live, a lot of doujinshi and even professional manga have "ashcan" versions as well; these probably also fit the standard.)
So, in this scenario you've proposed, there's a new font distributor in town offered by a tech titan... and it's similar to the recent ILT store, a new redistributor with a few new releases and the back catalogues of the foundries onboarded; but with myfonts-like open foundry onboarding, not invite only; and the main thing it's different is, a lower % revshare to the tech co because this is a side business for them that doesn't even have to break even, but similar prices offered to customers?
And there's no stated benefit to users/customers; the benefit to foundries is it would be expected to create competitive pressure on other distributors to take a lower cut?
I don't think this expectation is realistic...
Since the other distributors aren't exclusive, and just ask that the MSRP they offer customers isn't higher than the MSRP offered elsewhere, and they have all the existing sales volume, then it seems very hard for me for any new distributor to compete on wildly lower MSRPs. I remember the attempt by FontYou to enter the market, and getting foundries to go exclusively with them, was a tough pitch, because they didn't have the volume to make it attractive; but, without exclusive releases, I doubted they would be able to attract traffic.
Any new distributor starts with no traffic, but still some launched in the last 10 years and are still going concerns: but a tech titan store light that, doesn't have the curation of ILT, the innovation in licensing of fontstand, the design tool integration of Adobe, the OS integration of the Microsoft Font Store, the market reach of MyFonts, the asset bundling/subscription of Creative Market...
What's the customer benefit? If there isn't one, I can't see it happening.
The MS store is interesting, and maybe the closest to what you've proposed - since the OS integration offers a big addressable customer base. I'm not sure what their onboarding situation is like these days.
I feel like you took it a bit personally that I mentioned Google at first but it wasn't my intention at all. Or to relate you between the lines as some sort of provocation etc.
I made mistake and oversight one obvious thing. Google is already font distributor and it's already in the game. And it offers different model then any other distributor. Final users get exclusive free fonts, while designers get paid for their work (periodically or whatever, I read terms for submitting fonts for Google a long time ago). In that way, both sides should be satisfied: users with free licenses and designers with some sort of compensation.
My initial sentence was related with resources that Google have to compete with Monotype and the rest, as Google created infrastructure that almost everybody use today, plus it's not a company related to one type of business field only etc while everybody else in font market are focused on fonts mostly or only.
I just don't understand what the motivation would be for any titan to "compete with Monotype and the rest"; fonts is a zero billion dollar marketplace. They have such lines of businesses and while those can subsidize new lines of businesses, a small one like fonts seems like a distraction as that's never going to balloon. I heard nowadays Apple sells 100,000 iPhones every day, that's the kind of scale of opportunity that I believe any large capital is interested in investing in.
I think it's only small capital that will invest, the largest being the private equity groups like the one who owns MT now, and the smaller being what I must assume are self-funded efforts that are capitalized off the back of previous type retail sales profits and sweat equity. (It seems to be the base price for type labor is set by the opportunity cost of that talent going off to do something else that's more competitively priced upwards, like building the kind of web2 tech that's needed to stand up a novel font rental service or custom retail store with a future looking model.)
So, I'm genuinely curious if you or anyone has any suggestions about why a new titan play might happen; I'm out of ideas here, you've sort of nerd sniped me 🤣 (https://xkcd.com/356)
I agree that G is already in the game
For Amazon... Their Kindle serif typeface from DaMa could just as easily be OFL I suppose, since it isn't a directly monetized add on, but part of the costs of doing a billion dollar scale digital publishing business, just like GF. Indeed, I think Kindle devices also include a few other OFL options, I forget, it's been many years since I looked. So.... my guess is that it's unlikely we'll ever see a kindle font store, or any direct vending of 1,000s of fonts from them. I think titans will do OFL fonts.
Bezos already left Amazon to try colonizing space. And it seems to me, looping back to the original post on this thread, that indeed freeware fonts are "bad" and dying out, because while they were an effective vehicle for when floppy disks were a frontier, and the new frontiers of space and metaverse will find libre fonts' unrestricted redistribution, by the wildest anarchist cyberpunk or the largest mega corp alike, expanding them like air into every frontier space at maximum warp speed.
Downloading a zip of a hand selected set of static font files after swiping a credit card to install into a desktop operating system and use in a Desk Top Publishing application, is very back to the future: it's a mimicry of getting a floppy disk in the post after mailing a paper cheque with a tear-out order form from a printed catalog, to use in the same DTP application 30 years earlier.
Marshall McLuhan explained very well how this mimicry of an old technology is inherent to the rise of all new technology, and the old technology never goes away. In every town I've lived in, big and small, there's somewhere selling tickets to a theatrical show with real actors on stage. But cinema and then TV came along - and the capital flowed that way - starting with recordings of a stage, before Citizen Kane showed how the new technology could be used without mimicry of the old.
Desktops are old tech. I don't expect "lifestyle" businesses selling desktop licenses will ever go away completely, and there's always going to be this year's Broadway stars, up the street from starry foundries physical studios.
But the future of "free" fonts is libre fonts, and that future is already here.
As for the rest of your post... I noticed immediately that your definition of "Titans" is more rarified than mine. I would not think of the current owners of Monotypo as "small capital". I get that they don't have enough money to compete with Google, Facebook, Amazon, ect but I'd have said they were at the lower end of large capital. Certainly, I'd think they could compete with Etsy, who I think you are treating as a Titan?
Fonts are weird. Most of what you say about the current circumstances are certainly inarguable. But there's a way in which that has and will always seem "wrong". Fonts are so important to the functioning of society that there just "should" be more money in them. So, maybe at some point some Titan as you define it will crack that. Most of their fortunes have been made doing things the rest of us couldn't see, after all.
Then also look at the immediately preceding post, which is the one I was responding to.
Also, if I thought Google Fonts were a Bad Thing, I wouldn’t be making them.
I thought that whether legitimate free fonts were good or bad was the original topic of this thread, so I'd hardly call returning to that question, even if it wasn't addressed by your post, a tangent.
A lot of things are important to society, but if they can't be done profitably, they don't happen. Affordable housing, for just one example.
Etsy being more like Creative Market than eBay is a good correction, I appreciate and agree with that, but I don't think it changes my narrative
Ray, I agree freeware fonts as a marketing vehicle is dead, and people making freeware-only releases are trending towards libre instead. But I'm not sure about the platform argument; Google Slides and Figma work on my phone, but don't have stores. The latter allows desktop fonts to be uploaded. And that's the problem I mentioned in this post about DRM; any new platform is under a lot of pressure to allow legacy desktop fonts to "just work". https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/monotype-expands-font-desktop-rights-to-include-cloud-access-for-all-employees-within-organizations-301477599.html etc