I thought it might be useful to start of a thread about how to talk about various aspects of fonts with customers. This would be hard to do under any circumstances because so many customers have no experience at all talking about fonts. It's made even harder when you factor in language barriers, which are frequent.
I'll raise the first one. I find it quite tricky to talk about styles with customers. As I've mentioned in other threads, it's clear no me that customers view the style as the essential unit of a font. However, I'm not certain they all really know what a style is. Here are some examples:
- If I forget to say "we count Roman and Italic separately" many customers will assume they are getting both (or confuse them).
- I recently had a customer who purchased a basic license of two complete sub families of the same family and wanted web embedding. I explained that they should specify which styles to save money, which they understood just fine, but then they got very confused. They gave me five styles' file names (not the casual names "bold, semibold, etc" but the actual file names that included the subfamily) so I clarified that they wanted to embed styles from both families. They said yes but when I provided a quote for 10 embedded styles they pushed back "we only need five". I explained and it was fine but ug, I think that was exhausting for both of us.
- I frequently hear from a customer "my designer told me to license Halyard Bold" (Halyard has three opticals). So, I have to ask "which one?"
Some of this is definitely unavoidable. But I'm always trying to make the interactions smoother.
Does anyone have good customer service tricks for talking about styles?
Does anyone have other examples of customer confusion talking about fonts they'd like to work on?
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It might be different for custom work, but this is retail. My instinct is to meet people where they are.
But also, the fact of her giving the actual files names for only one of the two sub families is what caused the problem in the first place! This kind of pseudo precision is the thing that almost always is the source of customer confusion. If she had just listed five styles I'd have known she wanted it in both sub families, if she had listed ten file names I'd also have known what she wanted. Somewhere along the lines she started thinking of it as "five styles" instead of "five styles each in two sub families".
In reflecting on this, and your idea, I started to wonder if my fear of customer confusion caused the confusion in the first place. I could have probably just sent her an invoice and not taken the extra step of making sure they still wanted two sub families. If that was wrong she'd have corrected me, in which case she'd maybe have understood it better. My impulse to spoon feed clients styles could be adding friction.
I do not think that this kind of confusion is your fault or clients’ fault. This kind of confusion is sort of built into fonts, as software companies used and still use font names in different ways, piled up more font names to adress that, and caused fonts to contain a variety of font names from which to choose ...
I guess I agree with you that there's no fault here on either side. That said, I do think there's room for us font people to improve our communication skills so that we reduce the confusion. That was my point of starting this thread.
As a designer, I can tell you that sometimes my clients do things without me knowing. Which is to say that they might reach out to a foundry for licensing at a strange part of the design process and never let me know.
If the foundry were to ask to have me involved for the sake of clarity, then I’d ensure the client is licensing all of the right styles.
(Of course, all of this assumes the designer knows about styles, font licensing, etc.)
For example, say someone is tasked to license Demo Medium both Regular and Italic from MyFonts:
Now, say someone is tasked to license Magnet Medium both Regular and Italic from Frere-Jones:
In the MyFonts example, I see why someone could be confused as to whether the Italic is already included once you added the Regular or not. Especially the Shopping Cart view (00:20), where one might assume the Demo Medium already includes the Italic since it is presented without context. I am not saying the Frere-Jones example is perfect, but it is much clearer whether the Italic will be part of your checkout.
I use layperson's terms unless the client seems to know the lingo. Roman becomes upright or non-italic. There are no obliques—if it's slanted, it's Italic. I avoid the term typeface because it's a synonym for font in the thesaurus. Typefaces are font families and fonts are individual font styles.
When discussing embedding with programmers, fonts are described as the actual font files (.ttf or .otf). When discussing embedding on the web, I explain that web embedding means uploading font files to your website. And I explain that it's a web-specific file format (.woff2)—I try to keep that separate from the explanation about uploading to avoid confusion.
;-)
Mixed use licensing is something I've never found a good explanation that I can forward people to. If someone wants to add a free font to an open-source build, they can do a mixed-use setup where some elements are under a non- open-source license. I don't really know how it works, just that it exists.