Indie Fonts 3 was the first type specimen book I ever bought, from the gift shop at the National Gallery of Victoria (state art gallery). I adored it then, and treasure it now, even though I have many more specimen books.
I am toying with an idea to try to produce something similar. I know the landscape has changed, so my thinking is to use Kickstarter or a similar crowd funding platform and aim to get enough backers for a print run. Retail sales would not be the primary goal, but obviously I’d be open to it.
For those of you who participated in the Indie Fonts series, did you find it a rewarding experience? Did they pay you, or did you consider it part of your marketing strategy and as such advertising?
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In addition to getting 16 pages in the book, you also got 100 copies of the book which you could use however you liked. Some people sold them. I was selling fonts directly from my website at the time and gave them to customers who spent $100 or more. (I still have some left if anyone wants one.)
I think I got my money's worth from participating. It helped jumpstart my font business. I don't know if it would have the same effect in today's market, though.
I got the impression from Rich Kegler, who published it, at the time Indie Fonts 2 came out that it was a big headache to produce. But then, he did a volume 3.
Design writing is all puffery—publishers are not going to diss potential advertisers and readers want to hear what’s hot. And designers do so much self-promotion, given their easy access to creative tools.
While I too would like to see more independent design journalism, the Indie Fonts are not magazines but books that have little editorial text, barring the blurb at the front extolling the virtues of indie type design in general.
The Indie Fonts format is not too different from a curated content book such as Jan Middendorp’s Type Navigator—i.e. it is mostly good old-fashioned type specimens, presented in a format that is consistent throughout the book, which does enable a large measure of objective, hype-free appraisal. I might add that the “editorial” texts in Type Navigator were provided by the foundries.
The Slanted Yearbooks followed the Indie Fonts format—with foundries paying for a number of pages, some to a page layout design common with other participants, and some which are foundry-created pages that are promotional.
I’ve participated in Type Navigator (providing the publisher with fonts) and both Indie Fonts and Slanted Yearbooks. They is what they is.
I still have a box of Indie Fonts 3—each volume with a CD!
I was relying on Mark to do the heavy-lifting distribution.
I think the value of printed specimens, especially these days, if having something tangible for the historical record. yes, few people will really appreciate them, but to me that does not matter if they are art history artefacts. I know I love looking through my 1958 second edition of The Encyclopaedia of Typefaces, for example. Indie Fonts fits this space for me too, a time capsule of that era.
I've used Blurb and MagCloud a couple of times for images and found them good, I will pursue POD for my book (if I make it!) as it will be more of a passion project than lucrative retail hit I imagine.
My current idea is to approach a couple of foundries I have a good relationship with and work with them on books of just their catalogue. That way I can test the waters, they get a decent specimen book and we all can learn in the process. But I'm not setting any timeframe for this, it will just be something I do as I have headspace and capacity.