What kind of impact did digital/social media have on fonts?

Adam Ladd
Adam Ladd Posts: 259
edited June 1 in Type Business
Basically, just curious looking back a bit if there was a noticeable impact/opportunities in font business at the onset of the digital era (maybe 2000-2010-ish I'd guess)?

I was driving through an old part of town and noticing some "older" fonts in use on signage/branding (cooper, papyrus, etc). It just reminded me how "fixed" physical/printed items were before digital.

I guess there's just a conditioning now with the fluidness of digital, and I wondered if when brands really started to leverage digital outlets for communication if it helped drive more experimentation and adoption/licensing of fonts, or willingness to change more frequently (because it’s maybe “easier” to change).


Comments

  • John Butler
    John Butler Posts: 279
    The biggest effect I’ve noticed social media having on fonts is the sudden prevalence of Hoefler Text in Facebook reel captions.

     

  • Adam Ladd
    Adam Ladd Posts: 259
    ... for those who sold fonts in the rise of digital, did it seem like there was more frequent purchasing compared to before digital?

    I'm curious if there was a change in how often brands were willing to change/update fonts because digital allowed for more flexibility/less commitment (although may still impact identity system investments if changing too often).
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,709
    edited June 4
    TikTok used Proxima Nova as its default for a few years (2020 until last year, when they commissioned a custom font).

    I don’t know if social media specifically has had much effect on font sales for me (other than netting a big license from TikTok), but on-screen use of fonts (the web, apps, etc.) certainly has compared to when print was where fonts were mostly used.
  • lorcand
    lorcand Posts: 6
    I would say that Söhne has certainly had a 'visibility lift' by being widely used in Medium posts (paired with Source Serif Pro). It is also used by OpenAI on its website, which has been pretty high profile :-) 
  • John Nolan
    John Nolan Posts: 50
    Nice essay, Nick. Thanks for that. 
  • lorcand
    lorcand Posts: 6
    edited July 3

    As a non-initiate observer, here is a belated comment on the digital environment, following on from some of the systemwide comments above. I hope it may be of some interest.

    A major impact of digital, and the web, has been the emergence of large gravitational platforms, with network effects leading to concentration and market power dynamics (Amazon, Meta, Apple, Google,...). This often goes alongside workflow stickiness - using what is in the Microsoft or Apple environment, for example, or Shopify, Adobe, etc. 

    Google Fonts, Adobe and Monotype are three important platforms which show some of this concentration dynamic and market power in the font space. While each has a different business model and position, each has scaled their platforms to the network level where they effectively aggregate supply (fonts, foundries, designers) and demand (designers, publishers, website managers, and so on). We see the platform concentration familiar from the dynamics of the web in general. While their market power may be resisted by some, they channel a significant part of font distribution (what proportion, I don't know). Of course, this co-exists with a rich and diverse ecosystem of foundries/designers, and with a range of smaller aggregators and distributors (sometimes explicitly positioned as more community-focused alternatives). 

    They have different characteristics, again reflecting the dynamics of digital/network. 

    It seems to me that Google in particular exercises a kind of cultural power: the free and convenient distribution of fonts has created considerable volume of use around its popular fonts. A while ago Fonts Ninja claimed that 65% of websites use one of these: Roboto, Montserrat, Open Sans, or Lato, the four most popular fonts on Google. (ROMOLA - Roboto, Open Sans, MOntserrat, LAto.) 

    Adobe Fonts are importantly available in many designer workflows, have a subscription model and are easily deployed. I am interested that one occasionally sees discussions about Adobe fonts on Youtube roundups or elsewhere that misleadingly refers to them as 'free' because of this ready availability as part of the overall Adobe offer/workflow. Other workflow platforms may give chosen fonts lift and visibility - if they are defaults in Shopify, say, or Medium, or ... 

    Monotype is an example of the market consolidation we have seen in the web/digital era. It consolidates important IP through acquisition. It reminds me of Elsevier in the scholarly communication space, and there are other analogues, with similar love/hate dynamics. 

    In summary, it seems to me that the rise of web/digital has created significant systemwide platform and workflow dynamics in this domain as in others, as well providing opportunities for greater distribution of free and for-fee fonts. 

  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,171
    edited July 4
    I don’t dispute your analysis, lorcand, except to point out that the OP asked about the decade 2000–2010, when Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts weren’t yet in existence.

    For earlier “free” fonts, there were a few in the first days of desktop publishing—the “core” TrueType fonts, and those that came with the Apple LaserWriter, but the biggest influx came with the replacement of floppy discs by CDs, for the distribution and installation of e.g. Corel and Adobe applications. A lot of free fonts were packed onto those CDs, quality stuff, if not exactly au courant. CDs did provide some opportunity to designers such as myself—I received royalties for several years from Bitstream for a large CD collection they put out which included some Shinntype fonts.

    In the decade pre-WWW, and into the oughts, new type specimen books might include a CD with fonts, and there were even magazines that were published with font CDs.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,832
    Nick, I completely agree with the general thrust of your discussion, but I would suggest that almost all your references to “free fonts” should be to “bundled fonts,” which are not exactly free in either sense of the word.

    In the latter part of 2000-2010, Adobe actually moved toward bundling fewer rather than more fonts, coming down from a high point of about 220 fonts (IIRC) in the first half of that.

    Corel long escalated their bundles as well, but with much larger font counts. Some snapshots:
    - 4.2, 1993, 614 fonts
    - 5, 1994, 849 fonts
    - 9, 1999, 1344 fonts (the peak)
    - 11, 2002, 1196 fonts
    - 12, 2004, 1196 fonts
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,171
    Oh come on Thomas, they were free, as in “didn’t cost anything to acquire.”

    Adobe had been releasing apps on floppies, and then when they switched to CDs, BOOM, suddenly there was a lot of vacant disk space, so it was filled with all kinds of free stuff that I wasn’t expecting, didn’t ask for, didn’t need, and was not why I bought the thing. 

    In fact, I had already paid to licence Adobe Garamond and Berthold Bodoni Antiqua.


  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,832
    edited July 7
    Bundled is a very different value story than free. 

    First, the fonts themselves were not libre in license terms, as in restricting what one could do with them.
    Second, Adobe Illustrator was expensive, and nowhere near free.

    Don’t get me wrong, the bundled fonts were arguably worth the price of admission to the user buying Adobe products, and even more so for Corel (cheaper app, many more fonts). But very different than “free”; I paid for multiple versions of CorelDraw almost entirely to get the fonts. They were a bargain, but not free.

    Anyway, apologies to OP for thread drift!
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,171
    edited July 5
    First, yes free is not libre. Free, as in “without cost,” the standard meaning.

    Second, Illustrator was indeed expensive, but I was paying for an upgrade to something that was pretty much a professional requirement, which I would have bought without the free fonts, which were in fact a surprise. In that situation, where one intends to buy something, and the seller throws in some extra stuff of their choice at no extra charge, what would one call that but “free”? 
  • PabloImpallari
    PabloImpallari Posts: 802
    I think the most important social media impact on fonts was the expansion of language coverage, as the need for global fonts emerged.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,171
    Good point Pablo.

    Also, before that, the sheer size of OpenType fonts made such language diversity possible.
    I recall when the format was introduced, I became intrigued with making all the features I could now incorporate, and all the languages.

    At the same time, apart from John D. Berry’s Language Culture Type (2002), some printed Paratype specimens, and a weekend seminar in New York with Maxim Zhukov, being able to tackle Cyrillic and Greek would not have been possible without the Typophile web site, which is where a lot of problems were hashed out.
  • André G. Isaak
    André G. Isaak Posts: 632
    edited July 5
    Nick Shinn said:
    First, yes free is not libre. Free, as in “without cost,” the standard meaning.=
    But they weren't without cost. I purchased various versions of Illustrator purely for the fonts and never even installed the “free” software that came bundled with them. I assure you that the bundle cost me money.

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,091
    @PabloImpallari
    I think the most important social media impact on fonts was the expansion of language coverage, as the need for global fonts emerged.
    Internationalisation in software and fonts preceded social media; indeed, I would say that social media platforms became global, rather than being localised, because they could be built on top of internationalisation infrastructure built into the Web and operating systems. We’d focused our business on providing fonts for internationalisation since the mid-1990s.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,171
    @André G. Isaak
    I assure you that the bundle cost me money.
    Yes, the bundled fonts had value to you, because they could be licensed elsewhere for a greater cost.
    However, it was not possible to licence Illustrator without the fonts (the application was only provided on CDs with the fonts &c. bundled), therefore the fonts were free to Illustrator licensees.

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