Hi everyone.
I’m in the process of writing my Master Thesis about Change Management in SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) with a focus on type foundries and the font market. Can anyone point me to recent scientific papers or articles that look at the business side of type foundries and font licensing? I already did quite some literature research but it seems (not surprisingly), that this particular field of business studies isn’t especially well examined.
I’m happy about any leads and thanks in advance!
Best,
Tobias
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I'd suggest talking to Mary Catherine Pflug and Joyce Ketterer first. Then maybe Matthew Rechs and/or Christopher Slye, Bruno Maag.
I’m intrigued by the article! Please let me know if you have a release date.
At a macro level there are general models of income generation from font licensing and custom font development work but each comes with its own set of variables.
I'm not sure how much variation you'll find at the macro level but a great disparity once you start peeling off the layers of the onion.
The request for "scientific" information is what kept me away. I have a social science degree and so know most of my information is high quality anecdotal. Also, Not sure how far back he wants to go, I've only been in in the industry for 13 years which sounds like a lot but isn't.
My article in CA is about some aspects of how the industry has changed in the past decade, and outlook for the near future—particularly with regards to money in the business, how many new fonts are being made, licensing models, who is making fonts, those sorts of things. It got cut quite a bit for space reasons—1600 words on a topic that could very easily have been double that.
I will likely be publishing a sort of companion piece on my blog, that expands on a few specific aspects that I had to cut from the article. The looks-to-be-final version ended up quoting neither Joyce nor Bruno, for example.
JoyceKetterer Thanks for getting back to me as well. It looks like I’ve found uncharted territories. First and foremost I have to write the thesis but it is definitely tempting to make the topic my own and find a way to make the material collected in the process available in some way, shape or form. Type foundries as businesses (especially the independent ones) and typefaces as products are really hard to classify in a microeconomic context as they don’t completely behave as classic retail businesses.
Also, if one is doing pricing based on individual fonts, how on earth do you price a variable font? (Variable fonts do fit nicely into a “library access with monthly fee” pricing model, however.)
To your specific question, it's still possible to have an idea of the number of conventional instances in a variable font.
It's possible ... but sometimes it can get kind of silly with variable fonts. Typeface I am kerning right now (Science Gothic) has 4 axes, lots of range, and logically would have 315 instances. It gets reduced just because one doesn’t want menus to get too complicated.
9 weights
7 widths
3 levels of contrast (Y opaque)
2 italic vs not italic
There are two articles from Sebastien Morlinghem ("Renouveau") and Indra Kupferschmitt ("L'avenir est variable") in the 2019's edition of Graphisme en France. The essays are in French, but maybe you can ask the authors for an english version? Hope this helps!
@Stephen Coles Thanks a lot for the additional resources!
@ronotypo Thanks! I do speak and write French, even if it’s a little rusty lately, after all I’m Swiss