Asking for free fonts on Type Drawers

Eris Alar
Eris Alar Posts: 454
in Suggestions and Bug Reports
In a recent post a user asked about a free font. 

In my personal opinion, asking about free fonts on TD should be accepted and not discouraged because:

A) we don’t know where in their design journey the asker is, so helping them learn about well made type and where to get it helps them and others reading 

B) we can highlight why paying for type has value

C) TD can only thrive if we are welcoming of new voices 

I only started buying type after being on Typophile for years and learning lots there. 
I’m also pro having a type ID section but I know that is a lost cause here. I bought *lots* of type after asking for help identifying it or seeing others post in the type ID section of Typophile. 


Comments

  • Albert Creus
    Albert Creus Posts: 10
    Agree.
    Now, on the unvoluntarily rised topic of discussion here, who thought it was a good idea to make an emoji substitution of the pair B+), have they never made lists?
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,184
    Look at it from the type designer’s perspective, Eris.
    Suppose you had designed, published and promoted a font, and someone came to this site asking for a free alternative to it. How would you feel?

    The “Contributor Covenant” mentions:
    • Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting
    I put it to you that asking for a free alternative to a product which another member of the community makes their living from selling is inappropriate.
  • John Butler
    John Butler Posts: 283
    edited October 6
    I spend more money on fonts each year than I spend on application software, and some of my favorite fonts are free, including Nick’s own Bellefair, John’s Castoro, and a number of designs promoted and featured by Google Fonts. There are free versions of Deepdeene and Fairfield done by League of Moveable Type that I also use and appreciate, though the Linotype version of Fairfield that I licensed years ago from Adobe has a wider collection of weights. 
    Let free fonts be your gateway drug.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,184
    edited October 6
    I did indeed design a free font for Google, but as investigation rather than endorsement. Other than that and piracy, ya caint git Shinntype fuh nuthin. 
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,130
    Maybe simply discourage font recommendation requests in general, as with font ID requests?
  • Grant Bowers
    Grant Bowers Posts: 4
    I'll admit that I've contributed my share of free fonts to the market in the past, one of my numerous regrets in life.

    Do you think creating free fonts is detrimental for any serious type designer, or is that just a personal regret for you?

  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,120
    Questions or discussion about fonts that are freeware or open source are certainly legitimate. When I saw the title, though, my reaction was "Please don't", because I thought what was meant was people begging the font creators here for free copies of their commercial fonts.
    That would be very bad etiquette.
    Absent some ironclad copy protection for using fonts electronically (i.e., in PDF documents, on web sites, and so on) the issue of font licenses not always allowing electronic use will, I presume, continue to be a problem (even if some major foundries have now reconciled themselves to the situation)... and so even aside from being cheap, or wanting to avoid the hassle of getting a corporate expenditure approved, there's a tendency to just use free fonts for electronic projects, which hurts people trying to make a living from font design.
    Although I've been told otherwise by people who would know the facts, because they actually do make a living from font design, and I don't disbelieve them or seek to contradict them, I still wish to note that my instinctive gut feeling is that the people who pay money for fonts are usually people who have a real need to use exactly this particular typeface. Which means that nearly everybody except the owners of the typefaces "Times Roman" and "Helvetica" are out of luck.
    It's a good thing the situation really isn't as bad as that (or as that after being amended to include the owners of "Gill Sans", "Futura", and about 1,000 other typefaces).

  • Eris Alar
    Eris Alar Posts: 454
    Thanks all, good to hear some of the rationale. 

    For clarity, my OP was not intended to cover people asking for free versions of commercial type, oddly I had not even considered that use case, but instead people asking for advice on which free fonts might help them solve their layout problem. 

    My view is skewed because I still want this forum to be what Typophile was, a place for type users as much as type designers, yet I recognise that is not really the case. 

    Interesting to hear your feelings Ray. I’ll admit your free fonts in the 99s and early 00s were used a lot by me, and some of the first commercial type I paid for were Typodermic releases. But I see what you mean about the knock on costs and the cultural landscape changing. 
  • Jasper de Waard
    Jasper de Waard Posts: 637
    Nick Shinn said:
    I did indeed design a free font for Google, but as investigation rather than endorsement. Other than that and piracy, ya caint git Shinntype fuh nuthin. 
    Ray Larabie said:
    I'll admit that I've contributed my share of free fonts to the market in the past, one of my numerous regrets in life. However, I'd like to think that their quality was such that they never posed a serious threat to commercial alternatives.

    I might be wrong, but I am picking up an implicit sentiment here that free fonts are a bad thing, or that one should somehow consider the community of professional type designers when releasing a free font, as though it incurs some kind of debt to the community. By extension, the same could be felt for using a free font, or asking for a free font.

    This seems strange to me. If you want people to pay for your fonts, you will simply have to make sure that they are better than the free alternatives. That's how it always is in any industry. Whether releasing fonts for free is a good idea from the perspective of the designer who made the fonts is a different question, but I don't think we should attach any ethical value to free versus paid releases.

    Ray Larabie said:
    To draw a parallel, it would be considered tactless to ask for public domain music ideas for a commercial project on a forum dedicated to professional songwriters.
    And what if the project was not commercial? The best professionals point their audience to free alternatives, knowing that they can provide more value, but at a greater cost. Gatekeeping free alternatives seems like cheating your customers, and customers who realise they are not being cheated are more likely to return. More importantly, not everyone can afford paid typefaces, and I'd hate for typedrawers to be a rich-people-only kinda place. 

    Many of us are in a relatively unique position to actually navigate the jungle of free fonts and point people to the ones that are decent quality. I think it would be a waste to not make use of that.

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,130
    If you want people to pay for your fonts, you will simply have to make sure that they are better than the free alternatives.
    That suggests something like an equal playing field of individual type designers and foundries making fonts and choosing to either make them free or to charge for them. Something like that was the case when Ray was releasing freeware fonts in the 1990s, but today a lot of the libre font releases are funded by Google, and while the quality does vary it tends to be fairly high, not least because of the character set standards and QA tools that Google also funded. It used to be the case that commercial fonts tended to be higher quality than free fonts—with some exceptions, of course—, because more time and money was invested in their development. That is no longer the case.
  • James Hultquist-Todd
    James Hultquist-Todd Posts: 415
    ...Until Google decides it no longer cares about fonts. Their track record, when it comes to maintaining their projects, is not something I would bet on. 
  • Jasper de Waard
    Jasper de Waard Posts: 637
    John Hudson said:
    If you want people to pay for your fonts, you will simply have to make sure that they are better than the free alternatives.
    That suggests something like an equal playing field of individual type designers and foundries making fonts and choosing to either make them free or to charge for them. Something like that was the case when Ray was releasing freeware fonts in the 1990s, but today a lot of the libre font releases are funded by Google, and while the quality does vary it tends to be fairly high, not least because of the character set standards and QA tools that Google also funded. It used to be the case that commercial fonts tended to be higher quality than free fonts—with some exceptions, of course—, because more time and money was invested in their development. That is no longer the case.
    I never said it was going to be easy to be better*, but what is the alternative? If one is afraid of losing the competition to Google Fonts, than not helping people who ask for free font advice is hardly going to help, is it? Refusing to give such advice seems to me more an act of desperation than a way to sustain an income.

    *Better can also just mean different, and I do think it is still very possible. Paid fonts continue to sell, and Google Fonts is still mostly mediocre quality. Mediocre is a lot more than bad, and personally I think that's a good thing. Mediocre typography for all, excellent typography for those who can afford it. How it should be ;)
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,130
    Note that I have not argued in favour of refusing to help people find suitable free fonts. There are good reasons why someone might be looking for a free font, and reasons that preclude someone spending money to license a font for their current needs. I believe there is a net benefit to encouraging good typography, however it is arrived at.

    I don’t agree with Nick that Google have ‘poisoned the market’; rather, I think Google have exposed that the professional user market for fonts is smaller and shallower than some people believed.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,184
    edited October 7
    I too have not advocated banning free font requests at TypeDrawers. I merely wrote in my first post (in the previous thread referenced), that it’s “not a good look,” and above, “inappropriate.”
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,848
    Google Fonts has been around for 14 years and now has about 1700 families. But the font business has not been crushed by a libre fonts juggernaut.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,120
    Jasper de Waard said:
    I might be wrong, but I am picking up an implicit sentiment here that free fonts are a bad thing, or that one should somehow consider the community of professional type designers when releasing a free font, as though it incurs some kind of debt to the community. By extension, the same could be felt for using a free font, or asking for a free font.

    This seems strange to me. If you want people to pay for your fonts, you will simply have to make sure that they are better than the free alternatives. That's how it always is in any industry.
    To me, it's more understandable.
    Free fonts are perceived as a juggernaut that threatens the survival of font design as an industry... because a lot of font users are not particularly discriminating. So making sure one's own fonts are "better than the free alternatives" won't necessarily mean that you will be able to make a living.
    I think, though, that most typeface designers are realistic, and realize that their market is composed of two main groups: commercial ad agencies, and commercial publishers. They're the people for whom it's worth it to pay money for fonts. They need the best, and they need to differentiate their typography.
    Joe Blow who has a web site, or makes posters for his local community league or whatever is not realistically likely to be a part of the market (although occasionally one may be lucky).
    It's when one is not resigned to this that free fonts will seem irritating.
    Or, if the natural and proper market for commercial fonts described above... starts turning to free fonts because there are so many of them, so it can get away with it and still achieve the goal of differentiation... then that is legitimately disturbing. Typeface design has a long and honorable history, for it to die as a profession and be relegated to being... a hobby... would be an ignominious and undeserved fate, as type continues to do a great service to mankind.

  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,184
    edited October 8
    @Thomas Phinney
    Google Fonts has been around for 14 years and now has about 1700 families. But the font business has not been crushed by a libre fonts juggernaut.
    Yes, we have managed to survive the annexation of a huge potential emergent market.

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