New Fontspring site
Andreas Stötzner
Posts: 792
The homepage looks cheap and lacks any specific CI characteristics which gave the old site design a warm and inviting feel. The Fontspring logotype has fainted completely. The ‘search by foundry’ seems to have been abandoned entirely.
The font landing page looks like 5 or 6 items have failed to display. Just a tremendous waste of white space. Where are the font posters which we all love so much?!
Ah, you need to scroll down first in order to see them … note: you get presented one and a half pieces (!) of the artwork you so meticulously created. The slideshow only starts when you press the button on the right.
The family overview: a huge waste of space, again.
On clicking on one font this specimen window opens. It shows sample text in various sizes and a complete glyph repertoire. No option to pdf or print this, however.
I’m disappointed.
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Comments
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@Andreas Stötzner Fantastic and meticulous take down of a rebrand. We're working on a rebrand for Darden Studio now and so reading this gives me the shivers. They should have brought you in to consult before they launched!0
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It is always about user experience on a site.
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I've seen the future and...I was a little skeptical of the future of Font Spring after the Creative Market purchase. For now, it seems to be going in the right direction.The old design was good for the time but it was overdue for a refresh.The new design looks great. It's clean, modern and easy to navigate.It's austere, but I like that, it's like an art gallery, and it keeps the focus on the work.I'm not bothered by the 1 then 1/2 poster, it makes it clear that another poster is waiting to be seen and a creative way to cut down the horizontal height.The similar fonts feature on each family page, love that for the customer.I just noticed (not sure if this is new) the Fontspring Teams, which look promising.I love the way Font Spring has set up the licensing. It's clear and so user-friendly. You know exactly what you're getting. That's not new but it's worth mentioning.I've seen another reseller trying to convince customers that licensing is complicated and confusing. Ok, take a lesson from Font Spring and stop making it that way, ROFL.4
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In dealing with a variety of distributors, one of the most pertinent issue for my foundry is the size and format of the specimens I am required to provide. I quite enjoy making specimens, but it is still a bit of a chore.
I stopped providing posters to You Work For Them because its format is not 2:1, which is what several of my other distributors use.
It looks like I will have to redo all my posters for Fontspring at a higher resolution, now that the splash opens with such a large image; the present 2000 x 1000 px is not enough to show the type sharply when the poster occupies most of a desktop monitor screen.
I’ve conveyed this concern to the site.0 -
I like how variable fonts are prominent on the front page. Even if their interface doesn't support previews for them yet, it's progressive.
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The website looks pretty great on a mobile device. A problem Andreas noted – having to scroll down on the font landing page to see the banners provided by the type designer – does not happen on mobile at all. You see the font name and the first banner and a half on the same screen, with no need to scroll.
The old website’s color palette did not really seem to be in touch with what design looks like today. I suspect that some TypeDrawers might disagree that font surfing on a mobile device is relevant when desktop licenses are being sold, but all the font resellers will have their own statistics as to how customers are browsing their sites. What font buyers want from a website is usually different from what type designers think a font-selling site should feature.4 -
There is a ton of white space between elements. In general, I prefer more density on a web page, especially type shopping where side-by-side comparison is crucial. Sadly, contemporary web design has gone the opposite direction for a while. And often — as in this case — to the extreme.
What I do appreciate about the new Fontspring is a lack of cruft and visual distraction. UI features are easy to find and the type itself is the focus. This is good!1 -
It would be better if foundry pages had more than just a name. It needs a bit of branding, imagery, and intro text to reflect the personality of each label, and indicate that these fonts come from a particular person or group of people.4
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I for one am very impressed with Fontspring's redesign. It's clearly a step in the right direction even if it's not completely perfect (yet), and I'm sure their team will polish the remaining important details (and possibly add a few flourishes here and there).
Their homepage is in my opinion actually not the most important site -- the individual font family pages are, and those are the ones I'm most happy about as they're very clean and to the point. They let the product imagery take center stage and present it proudly, unlike MyFonts' recent redesign for example, which sadly reduced the font gallery images and now displays them at a measly 400 by 200 pixels. As these were for years (and still are) requested to be designed at a minimum resolution of 1440 by 720, type designers took advantage of the screen real estate and used the gallery images to showcase their fonts in different ways; displaying anything from just a few characters to a block of text -- yet MyFonts' redesign renders many of those existing ones useless, as only the panels that show a few words at most now remain readable at the newly reduced sizes. Not to mention that any attempt by the designer to set a mood or theme unique to their font through these images is now largely thwarted at these sizes. A shame really.
So kudos to Fontspring, it's feels great to open any typeface's page and immediately be greeted with the beautiful preview images as their designers intended, appropriately sized so their details could be enjoyed.4 -
You are wrong about the MyFonts size limitation, Val.
If you hit ‘Command +’ to increase display size, the poster image will grow to occupy the whole screen—which causes it to run into the same issue I flagged above, at Fontspring, insufficient resolution and fuzzy type. (Not an issue on mobile devices, but on the user’s iMac, yes it is.)
This is particularly apparent in comparison with the huge, sharp, “live” type that is now trending front and centre in many font marketing sites.
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Am I the only one who is not getting previews?
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I was also disappointed to see the inviting warmth of the previous website missing from the current one. It fit well with the worry-free theme of FontSpring, and the persistently applied CI felt professional to me (though I'm not in any position to judge that).I don't mind the white space. Space is free on a website, as long as the initial view grabs the viewer's interest. I don't care much about mobile websites — who in their right mind does business on the phone when they have a computer? But then I might just be too old for this...Jasper: I am getting previews, but they are disappointingly small at the highest size setting. I'd like to be able to inspect individual glyphs up close.
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I think that the new Fontspring might attract attention just because it’s different. If they start doing a refresh every other year it could be a great way to attract eyes that MyFonts’s aging design doesn’t. Klim redesigns every couple of years and I assume that works because Kris hasn’t stopped doing it.0
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An update on my observation about the fuzzy rendering of posters at large size on the new Fontspring site: it appears to be because the original .png file, which would have been OK at 2000 x 1000 px, has been compressed by the site architecture to facilitate load time. They are looking into it. I surmise the Myfonts site redesign has the same issue.0
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Here's a quote from a Fontspring promotional email I and, I assume, many of you received today.The cost of growing and improving is expensive. For the past few years, we’ve known that our unique 70% royalty rate was unsustainable. While we’ve resisted this change for many years, we’ve come to the difficult conclusion to adjust our royalty rate to the industry standard 50%.
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Great, I look forward to the main player in the industry, Monotype, adopting that standard too.0
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Just a reminder before it disappears from the Fontspring website and everyone thinks that the 50% payout for designers is set in stone and has always been that way and is also completely justified and a fair business practice.
https://www.fontspring.com/fair-fonts
Fair Fonts
Fontspring loves our customers and our font designers. And we love customers who love font designers. We pay the highest royalty rates (70%) to our designers and our affiliates (17%). Buy your fonts from us and know that the people who deserve it are getting the largest cut of the sale.
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Awww, this is disappointing. Not the pay cut but the possibility that they don't love us anymore, lol.and Monotype making all but the desktop licenses annual and cutting the discounts...I can't even.
Bring back Makambo! LOL Does anyone even remember that font reseller?0 -
I do. They were years ahead with their “wizard” for uploading one’s wares. I spent ages making images for all my fonts according to their specs, and then they pulled the plug and that was all for nought. MyFonts contacted all their suppliers, and I migrated.
MyFonts was returning 80% then!!1 -
I foolishly expect royalty rate decreases will result in better promotion, and I'm made a fool every time.
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and they use an interesting website encoding
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As much as I like Fontspring, I'll point my website purchase links to whatever site has the highest percentage, and (checks notes) for me that's Font Bros at 65%. When distributors join the 50% club, they're aware that reduced incoming links from foundries is part of the deal.
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Klim redesigns every couple of years and I assume that works because Kris hasn’t stopped doing it.
Klim site, v1: 2004Klim site, v2: 2012
Klim site, v3: 2019
Weird to insinuate we redesign for the sake of it.
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Sorry Kris, I thought you had done more redesigns than that.0
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