The homepage looks cheap and lacks any specific CI characteristics which gave the old site design a warm and inviting feel. The Fontspring logotype has fainted completely. The ‘search by foundry’ seems to have been abandoned entirely.
The font landing page looks like 5 or 6 items have failed to display. Just a tremendous waste of white space. Where are the font posters which we all love so much?!
Ah, you need to scroll down first in order to see them … note: you get presented one and a half pieces (!) of the artwork you so meticulously created. The slideshow only starts when you press the button on the right.
The family overview: a huge waste of space, again.
On clicking on one font this specimen window opens. It shows sample text in various sizes and a complete glyph repertoire. No option to pdf or print this, however.
I’m disappointed.
Comments
I stopped providing posters to You Work For Them because its format is not 2:1, which is what several of my other distributors use.
It looks like I will have to redo all my posters for Fontspring at a higher resolution, now that the splash opens with such a large image; the present 2000 x 1000 px is not enough to show the type sharply when the poster occupies most of a desktop monitor screen.
I’ve conveyed this concern to the site.
The old website’s color palette did not really seem to be in touch with what design looks like today. I suspect that some TypeDrawers might disagree that font surfing on a mobile device is relevant when desktop licenses are being sold, but all the font resellers will have their own statistics as to how customers are browsing their sites. What font buyers want from a website is usually different from what type designers think a font-selling site should feature.
What I do appreciate about the new Fontspring is a lack of cruft and visual distraction. UI features are easy to find and the type itself is the focus. This is good!
Their homepage is in my opinion actually not the most important site -- the individual font family pages are, and those are the ones I'm most happy about as they're very clean and to the point. They let the product imagery take center stage and present it proudly, unlike MyFonts' recent redesign for example, which sadly reduced the font gallery images and now displays them at a measly 400 by 200 pixels. As these were for years (and still are) requested to be designed at a minimum resolution of 1440 by 720, type designers took advantage of the screen real estate and used the gallery images to showcase their fonts in different ways; displaying anything from just a few characters to a block of text -- yet MyFonts' redesign renders many of those existing ones useless, as only the panels that show a few words at most now remain readable at the newly reduced sizes. Not to mention that any attempt by the designer to set a mood or theme unique to their font through these images is now largely thwarted at these sizes. A shame really.
So kudos to Fontspring, it's feels great to open any typeface's page and immediately be greeted with the beautiful preview images as their designers intended, appropriately sized so their details could be enjoyed.
If you hit ‘Command +’ to increase display size, the poster image will grow to occupy the whole screen—which causes it to run into the same issue I flagged above, at Fontspring, insufficient resolution and fuzzy type. (Not an issue on mobile devices, but on the user’s iMac, yes it is.)
This is particularly apparent in comparison with the huge, sharp, “live” type that is now trending front and centre in many font marketing sites.
Am I the only one who is not getting previews?
https://www.fontspring.com/fair-fonts
Fair Fonts
Fontspring loves our customers and our font designers. And we love customers who love font designers. We pay the highest royalty rates (70%) to our designers and our affiliates (17%). Buy your fonts from us and know that the people who deserve it are getting the largest cut of the sale.
Bring back Makambo! LOL Does anyone even remember that font reseller?
MyFonts was returning 80% then!!
Klim site, v1: 2004
Klim site, v2: 2012
Klim site, v3: 2019
Weird to insinuate we redesign for the sake of it.