I’m a customer of DSType, have been for many years, and got an email today saying this (text copied from email):
Dear customers, colleagues, friends,
As we celebrate 30 years of typeface design and the 20th anniversary of DSType’s online presence, I'm reaching out to share a pivotal moment in our journey. I am pleased to inform you that our first type collection has been acquired by Monotype and will now be exclusively available through Monotype Fonts and MyFonts. We will be making a wider announcement with Monotype in the coming weeks. We are immensely grateful to you for your loyal business over the years. Rest assured, our first catalog of typefaces you've grown to love will still be available to you moving forward. All of the typefaces you previously purchased from our collection will remain available for download in your client area. Furthermore, we're developing a new section on our site to seamlessly link you to our first type collection on MyFonts.
As we entrust our first collection to Monotype, we remain dedicated to creating the best contemporary typefaces on the market. We've been working diligently and are excited to announce Bluteau, an unobtrusive typeface featuring over two hundred styles. We are also in the process of developing many other fonts that we are looking forward to sharing with you soon. Let's embark on this new journey together.
Yours respectfully,
Dino dos Santos
DSType
Comments
That said, at this point, my working assumption is that Monotype has approached, or is approaching, every foundry that does work above some particular quality level, as long as they have enough fonts to make it interesting. And clearly “enough”… is not a huge number.
2. ?
3. Profit!
There are a few ways (even, ways I care about) in which in-person training works better. But the ability to gather people from anywhere with adequate internet bandwidth, the acceptance that remote (esp. video) training is a reasonable option, and improvements in the platforms for delivering training that way... have changed everything.
One obvious one would be to add specified characters to an existing font. For example, new currency symbols, or diacritics.
There is also the issue of inflation. Unless you plan to spend the money immediately, it makes better financial sense to just let the fonts keep bringing income in as you go along rather than get 4 or 5 times what you make in a year and lose a big part of that to taxes then inflation. The only calculation that makes sense in selling a library is if you are desperately in need of money now, or you are dying very soon and with no one to inherit. Otherwise, royalties over time will likely generate more than what Monotype will pay.
As to the upkeep of sold libraries, that is highly unlikely. They won't get marketed either. They will just get added to the pile of fonts Monotype has, bundled with the other 150,000 fonts available on the Monotype Fonts subscription.
There is also the socio-technological factor. Art is created almost always for an audience. There are now mobile phones that surpass anything Hitchcock ever had, yet I have not heard of a new Hitchcock for the 21st century appearing. I guess this is because creators are now much more exposed to the public via social media, which means they mostly have to deal with abysmally mean comments on a daily basis, for years until they give up and retract in their shell, or become tougher. Of course there have always been critics, but this seems to be the first time in history when everything you do creatively can be analyzed by tens of thousands of them down to an atom, and yet you have to bear with this if you want to have exposure which you can hope to monetize. It is a harsh paradox... The whole social media situation has also had, at least in my opinion, an effect of making everything bland. Just as Garfield can't be original after 14 thousand strips, I can't hope to post something of my own and get a following if it's not easily comprehensible by the masses. If I post a picture with Darth Vader, this is instantly recognizable and I would get more likes. If I spice it up with some sexual quip, even more likes, some of which I can perhaps convert to clients. But if I want to do something original, people don't like things that are new, so the 10 000 critics situation I described above takes place. Once there were many interesting and new things about fonts/Star Wars - now it will become more about trade disputes. And people got accommodated to that. What has seemed bland and boring in 1999 is now the norm.
Of course there are people that don't care at all about other people's opinions, but even they have a certain point of breaking.
I don't know if this is a heart-wrenching post or simply a description of the maturity of the market of digital fonts. The tree found fertile soil, it grew very rapidly while the farm boy that tended to it also grew, the tree gave excellent fruit, and now will have to be pruned by the same person, who is now more mature, slower, but richer and much more experienced. Some branches may die, some branches may be broken by storms, but overall the tree will live on with loving care, and it will not die.
But they are not all the same, and neither are their designs, and although in toto the impression may be bland, with only a few that are exceptional, hasn’t it always been that way?
I don’t share your lack of faith in the ability of type designers to create relevant and different new concepts. Changes in technology always open up new, unpredicted opportunities—and in fact there are still many possibilities of the OpenType format, now 20 years old, yet to be realized.