This is what Monotype is doing instead of anything helpful
Comments
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What’s the new poster size? I still see the old one.0
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MyFonts posters are now 400×200 on the desktop with no option to view a larger image. I think this is an effort to unify the interface across all Monotype retail sites. Until recently, Fonts.com had very wide, low-resolution posters with no click/expand. Fonts.com currently shows 560×280 banners in 2:1 aspect ratio. Perhaps this is related to how inefficient the 2:1 format is on mobile devices and social media feeds. 2:1 aspect ratio posters appear about 30mm high on a phone so they’re not useful for showing any details about a typeface—just a splash of color and texture to convey a vibe. If they had stuck with the old 1:1 ratio, the posters could have served a useful purpose on social media and in their mobile interface. I think they should have switched to 4:3 ratio a decade ago when it was obvious that 2:1 ratio wasn’t going to be part of the future. Anyone who shares on social media or distributes on sites like Creative Market are already producing both 2:1 ratio and 4:3 ratio anyway. I already have both formats of all my posters, but it would be a huge burden to ask all foundries to switch to 4:3 or provide both and MyFonts would be stuck with a site where half the posters were still in 2:1. This gives distributors with 4:3 posters an advantage. On Creative Market, they have big posters on each typeface page with social media share buttons. On the desktop you can click/expand and get huge posters that fill the browser window as you scroll. That’s why I think MyFonts is currently diminishing the importance of the poster on the main scroll. Those posters are still useful for their campaigns so providing high resolution versions is still worthwhile. But even in those campaigns I’m sure they wish they had the option of 4:3.
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Very weird. It is possible to see the images full size but it takes two steps: Right click to select "Open image in new tab", and then remove "width=720,height=360" from the url that results; I don't even know how or why the site imposes this on a request for the browser to just look at the image.
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If I right click and save the image to my desktop it's 720×360 in webp format but actual size in the browser is 400×200.0
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I'm amused how many bad decisions they are capable to make. Take any font and try to see in details each poster – you won't be able to read the most of text on it.
What's the point of posters then? To have them as necessity, but they practically have no use now. I invest hours in making them. What for? To be able to not see anything on them? I'm really pissed off. And not just cause of posters. So much bad steps they have done in just last year, I'm really concerned if it's multimillionaire company or by some Tiktok influencer.
Sorting (by the most recent) doesn't works also...2 -
I don't know why but the click expands don’t work on the posters on Fonts.com—I was sure they worked yesterday but they don’t today. Fonts.com has a solution to the problem of having two different widths of promo graphics on the same site: a sliding strip. That allows 2:1, 4:3, or any ratio images to coexist. The Fonts.com posters aren't very large but at least they're not as tiny as they are on MyFonts.
That’s not to say the Fonts.com site is good. Some images don’t even load. Sometimes I see images that I’ve removed still showing up. Even though the images are only 280 pixels high, it’s loading the original resolution images, in my case 2880×1440, around 4MB per image. I normally supply seven images per typeface so that’s about 28MB of images each. You'd figure they’d have a system to reduce the thumbnails to something more manageable. I’m no web expert but that seems basic. And they still don’t indicate language support which I think is completely crazy. Am I wrong? Do customers not want to see which languages are supported? The whole presentation feels amateurish to me, but I wonder if customers see it differently.
Here’s another issue on MyFonts. When you go to a single font typeface, it starts you in the Family Packages tab which reads, “Packages of this family are not sellable. Please check Individual styles.” First of all, why the capital I? And secondly why would they want the first thing customers read to be “not sellable”? That tab should be grayed out or hidden. Under Glyphs there’s an option to choose a style, even though there's only one—why is this helpful for shoppers? Hiding a page element shouldn’t be that hard. It’s not like single font typefaces are a rare thing.
Here's my fan theory. I don’t think it’s possible that the staff at Monotype are unaware that their sites are a wreck. I’m sure they know—it’s impossible for them not to know this. Monotype downsized their staff so much that the existing systems couldn't be modified or properly maintained. New hires discovered that the best solution was to create an entirely new unified system that would run all the Monotype owned sites. (I hope so because that’s the only sensible solution I can see) When it’s complete they’ll nuke the old sites from orbit and start anew. This would explain why they’re incapable and/or unwilling to fix glaring issues with the current sites. MyFonts recently switched to smaller posters not because they thought it was better but because somebody broke something. The new staff is smart but they’re dealing with 20 years of rat’s nest coding and trying their best to balance patching up the old sites and committing time to whatever is going to replace it. I don’t know if any of this theory is true, but if I look at it through that lens, the problems with their sites make more sense to me. That’s my armchair quarterback opinion of what’s going on there based on my observations of changes to the sites since the downsizing event.8 -
Ray, I agree and it seems logical all what you wrote, but that's not problem of us who sell trough their website(s). At least, it shouldn't be, but as we're discussing about it, it surely became.
If I make a car, I won't sell prototypes to customers. I would firstly test it well before going into production. Same goes for their website(s) – they didn't have to change anything till they made proper new website, fully tested in their local environment. We have unfinished product now that's worst then previous version that were functional.
The biggest problem is that all their decisions effects on our sales. We waited for months to get back operated promotion section (with letting us to set promotions from time to time and not allowing the new families to be on sale). That was not fair to us who sell fonts there and I'm sure some part of customers also noticed that something is going on with the website.
You have the money, you practically control the biggest part of the market and you let your self such amateurish behaviour. That's simply non acceptable for such big company with such history.
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They might be testing multiple versions of the web site to see which one leads to the most sales. This is common in web design.Dusan Jelesijevic said:If I make a car, I won't sell prototypes to customers. I would firstly test it well before going into production. Same goes for their website(s) – they didn't have to change anything till they made proper new website, fully tested in their local environment. We have unfinished product now that's worst then previous version that were functional.
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But that doesn’t mean that everything they’re testing isn’t shit.1 -
One more issue with a new MyFonts website is the changed font family url address format. And now some of existed external links to the font families are don't work, however all the others old links are successfully redirected to the new address. I submitted a bug ticket to them. Hope it's temporary.
The old address example:
myfonts.com/fonts/michael-rafailyk/fioritura/
The new address example:
myfonts.com/collections/fioritura-font-michael-rafailyk3 -
A positive thing Monotype (inadvertently) caused: there are many interesting things I like in some of your typefaces: keep up the research/work!Michael Rafailyk said:One more issue with a new MyFonts website is the changed font family url address format. And now some of existed external links to the font families are don't work, however all the others old links are successfully redirected to the new address. I submitted a bug ticket to them. Hope it's temporary.
The old address example:
myfonts.com/fonts/michael-rafailyk/fioritura/
The new address example:
myfonts.com/collections/fioritura-font-michael-rafailyk
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This is going to break millions of affiliate links. Leave it to them to not think of that.Michael Rafailyk said:One more issue with a new MyFonts website is the changed font family url address format. And now some of existed external links to the font families are don't work, however all the others old links are successfully redirected to the new address. I submitted a bug ticket to them. Hope it's temporary.
The old address example:
myfonts.com/fonts/michael-rafailyk/fioritura/
The new address example:
myfonts.com/collections/fioritura-font-michael-rafailyk1 -
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@James Puckett I tried clicking some old affiliate links and it appears that their system automatically forwards to the new URL.1
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Something that I really like from Monotype lately is their podcast. There have been other type-related podcasts over the years but this one's my favorite so far. They've got lots of interesting guests and they keep it tight. Does anyone else here listen to it? If you haven't tried it, look up Creative Characters on your podcast app of choice.3
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@Ray Larabie. I'm a big podcast listener and haven't even heard of this one till now. Do you have favorite episodes you'd suggest I listen to?0
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@JoyceKetterer James Horwitz, Ellen Lupton, and Hannelore Ocampo (Ford Motor Company). If you're into punk rock/new wave music history, don't miss the recent Andrew Krivine Michael Worthington episode.2
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Back to the MT NFTs: I checked the site and it appears only 17 out of about 10,000 have sold. (If you understand NFTs better than I, please correct me.) I don’t think this was a winner for them.1
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The project is also no longer on their homepage or press page, and any mention is actually kind of hard to find on their site except for a few blog posts about NFTs in general and a sort of apologetic FAQ. https://www.monotype.com/resources/expertise/helvetica-nft-faq1
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That FAQ is hilarious. They should have just had one question: “Is this a cash grab?” and answered “Yes.”2
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I think this concept was developed when NFTs were booming and the timing of the release was unfortunate. In early 2021, most of the media coverage about NFTs seemed positive. If this had launched in late 2021, I think it would have been a marketing win as it would have caught the tail end of the trend. In other words, it's like working for a year on a Macarena remix and releasing it in late 1997 after most people had their fill of it.2
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@Ray Larabie I saw this the other day and it seems Macarena had a longer and weirder history than I had remembered :-) I’m sure there is type industry parallel in there somewhere haha0
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@Eris Alar Todd's video is exactly why that topic was on my mind.0
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@Ray Larabie haha nice 👍0
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When is Monotype going to allow us to see MyFonts sales reports again? The ability to see them ended at the end of June with Monotype saying they would be able to be viewed again ‘soon’.4
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my concern exactly. I’m sure the reasons are not on the technical side.Nick Cooke said:When is Monotype going to allow us to see MyFonts sales reports again? The ability to see them ended at the end of June with Monotype saying they would be able to be viewed again ‘soon’.
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After a few back and forth emails with foundry support requesting license details, not just sales numbers, they just stopped responding to me. I reached out via a Twitter DM and was told to email foundry support. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯1
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