Is the font design business profitable for you guys? I have converted a few of the typefaces I have designed for movie, book and game titles that I created in the last 30 years with font designer partners. Most are big, bold display fonts based on logos or titles that I created. We are not selling very many fonts. Maybe our work sucks. Maybe there are way too many fonts already out there.
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A few miles from me in London is a highly successful font business that boasts a team of forty: type designers, font developers, creative directors, software engineers and support staff. They don't mention their marketing team - modesty clearly prevents this. Their answer to the question would probably be 'Yes, the font design business is profitable'.
I draw this conclusion: simply offering fonts for sale is not enough to generate sales, let alone profit. For a font business to be profitable a foundry needs to indulge in energetic brand building and promotion to achieve exposure. I suspect that successful foundries like the aforementioned, in common with a variety of modern companies, commit increasingly significant resources to promotion. The success of a product is not necessarily an indicator of quality, nor is pricing a deal-breaker.
For me, lack of profit is a disappointment but font design is more obsessive compulsion than profitable business. I can live with that.
Objectively we are successful. But I am very aware that we got lucky. It might be timing. It might be Josh's personal charisma that gave us a boost 17 years ago when he started the company, I honestly don't know.
There is:
- designing typefaces solo or creating your own team, whether for the retail market or eventually/also commissions (but of course, getting those just starting out is very hard)
- working for a foundry owned by somebody else. This may be less original design and more production or related work.
- working for a related entity, which might be type design or more design-adjacent. Even more likely to involve a range of work.
Some situations are in-between or a mix. My current main gig is… mostly in the third category, with a bit of the second, I think? Currently my main gig for Google has been, taking a regular weight of icons designed by somebody else, figure out what it would mean to vary the weight, grade, optical size (that already partly defined), and do an animated fill axis (fill variants were previously defined, but not any more) then do those for 2000+ icons. With a few more issues and surrounding work, but that is most of it. With one to two people working for/with me.Is that type design? Qualified yes? Before that there were three of us doing a 4-axis variable font, which had a regular weight based on Bank Gothic. That was definitely type design. A commissioned font gig for Google. Still have some finishing touches to do on that one so it can ship.
Then I am doing a bunch of forensic font gigs as well.
Going solo and not being a company employee has been great for me financially, after the first few months—and continues to improve so far.
However, once you do the extremely hard thing that retail font will probably radically out perform the earnings of the custom project. This is why some of us choose to focus on retail. It's also why so many can't or don't, the shorter term guarantee of income is very seductive.
In terms of the original question I would think that only the entities that sell fonts or font services, whether individuals or companies, would qualify in terms of standing to make a profit as such, these being the copyright holders or publishers, that is to say the product owners or the service providers. While many people may derive income from the font business, income is not the same as profit. It would be like asking a salaried shop assistant whether the retail business is profitable.
Furthermore, in order to establish profit you need to establish costs and I don't suppose the thousands of individual font makers have anything but the vaguest idea. Undocumented days or even months can slip by when a font demands attention. It's unlikely that many font makers can identify the point at which their costs are covered and profit kicks in. The idea, of course, is that sales will continue long after development effort is a distant memory. I wish.
More hair splitting I know, but the distinction is relevant.
“It would be like asking a salaried shop assistant whether the retail business is profitable.”
You probably don’t mean to be offensive or insulting here. And yes, of course the profitability of a business is a separate matter from the personal profit/loss of its employees.
- if the ultimate owner of the work is a company that is not really in the font design business, does that mean the work doesn’t even count? And the hundreds of people who have been commissioned to make open source typefaces?
- There are a ton of other contractors and folks working on a project basis on fonts. Many of us are doing font design. And in many cases we choose to do it this way precisely because it makes more money (and/or more reliable money).
- For individuals, “making a profit” is a totally separate issue from owning the material you have made. Being commissioned to make a typeface that is then either owned by another entity or is open source does not mean somebody is not in “the font design business.”
- the “salaried shop assistant” analogy is misleading. Just because someone does not own the fruits of their labors does not make them a low-level employee whose work requires no special skills. And a significant portion of the people doing this make a better living than a “salaried shop assistant.”
Thomas, you have successfully expanded this thread with a number of interesting observations. You make the point that there are many ways of being involved in and making money in the type design business which is undeniably true. I do not suggest that your comments are off topic - they usefully expand the issue.
My own intention was to ensure that the spirit of the original question was not lost. James Bridges has a range of fonts for sale, is experiencing poor sales and wonders if anyone can offer any general observations as to why. I don't suppose they can, but any comments on the state of the font design business from the point of view of those trying to sell their own fonts would presumably be welcome. He couches his question in terms of profitability which is why I started picking at it.
Aside from that, I do not want to push this thread further into this alternative discussion.
1. Quality (as he mentioned, but i've not seen his stuff so I don't know)
2. Heavy Display. (These fonts can do well on volume but each one will only be used in a limited way by a few customers. sometimes you hit the jackpot with a big client, usually not)
3. Fashion. (All things being equal, some things still make no money because they aren't cool right now.)
Some other possible reasons:
a) these fonts were all made for specific clients and converted. maybe they don't have broad enough appeal, or maybe they need more technical refinement for the retail market
b) it's only a few fonts, maybe the only way this sort of catalogue can do well is if there was more
c) we don't know where the font licenses are being sold but it could be they aren't in the right spot for them. Fonts are like jewelry stores, they do better when they cluster together with similar stuff.
Additionally I can say that lots of people do make a good living from fonts. But also lots don't. Some of it is luck. Some of it is that you really do need to specialize it in. Also, retail releases need research so you know what is missing in the market and what you can contribute that will be original.
From what I understand, it's a difficult time to get started. If you have an existing library of high exposure typefaces (movie, book, game titles) this may help to set you apart.
You mentioned you are not selling very many fonts:
1. What is your existing business model for selling fonts?
2. Which business models are you exploring / most interested by?
The typefaces we have created have been altered to not look exactly like the book, movie and game titles I have designed. I would never use the actual names as a font name because they are different and that would most likely be a copyright issue. And I made sure any letterform that was used in a logo or title was redrawn to be unique.
Business model? I'm not that sophisticated at this point. We are selling a few at two retailer sites.
I am not going to quit my day-job.
LAUNCHING A FOUNDRY WEBSITE 1.0: an email newsletter from Contrast Foundry
A twitter thread of income graphs from OHno Type Co (2019)
“Direct sales from our website, since we started in August 2015.” Another OHno Type Co tweet.
Typographics 2018: It’s About Time with Peter Bil’ak
The type business isn't profitable at at all for me
But I have noticed that sales spike if I comment anything on some thread on Facebook with, say, 20 000+ comments, or some very popular YouTube video. I have gotten into contact with wildly unexpected clients just because they saw my comment somewhere and that has made them google me.
I make good coin from these and my other projects, and am willing to buy shares in other peoples fonts sales. Haven't done it yet, but I can see myself sending money to some foundry in exchange for a say in the final design a share of the sales. But it's preferable to just buy stocks like a normal investor, if we go down this path. Maybe some precious metals, that always has value. Or quality alcochol - it actually increases in value over time. Coffee is a good investment.
I have comissioned artwork some time ago so I can work on it some more and to sell on sites like shutterstock, but I noticed a great many designs get stolen and reworked by an in-house designer until they can't be proven to be stolen, so I think selling visual media on the web is like selling fonts - a business model that was way more profitable back in the day then it is now. You just need to go to a site like Unsplash to get tons of free images. Let me not mention sites like Freepik - I have a hunch things there are somewhat fishy, but that didn't stop my employers making me download stuff from there and tinkering with it for the company, so I've been in both camps.
I am reminded of how big of a craze clipart was back when, compared to now, when it has almost disappeared as more and more people got wise to how to do better and better presentations. Or just wise to pay some Indian $20 to do it for them.
My two cents.