Type Reference

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Type Reference
Type Reference Posts: 1
edited June 30 in Type Resources
Hi all,

I’m David, part of a small team that recently launched Type Reference, a curated archive of historical type specimen books. The material comes from a private collection and includes high-quality scans of rare specimens from the 1800s onwards.

You can browse everything visually, with both monthly subscriptions, and one-off payments. We're adding new books each month as we digitise them

If it’s useful to your research or work, we’d love to hear what you'd like to see more of.

Thanks,
David

p.s. I hope this is the right category for this post. Realise it's kind of an "ad", but I'm hoping it will be helpful for the larger community!

Comments

  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,015
    edited June 30
    I think this could become a super valuable service. Some great type catalogs are included, and a fair variety for launch, for sure.

    I saw you had a search function, so I tried a number of searches for names of typefaces that are in the 1941 ATF catalog supplement, and got no hits. I would think that typeface name search is a must-have feature to make this a valuable service. Did I miss something?

    The images of the sample catalogs seem to be photos rather than scans, and not forced flat at all. For brief catalogs that lay pretty flat anyway, this is not a big deal. But for the 1941 ATF catalog (and I would expect most large catalogs of 100+ pages), the images are MUCH less useful than they could be, for people hoping to make fonts based on those scans.

    The pricing (£35/mo with watermarked images and no image download capabiity, £60/mo with no watermarks and direct downloads) is much higher than I would have guessed. But I will be the first to say that pricing something like this must be very challenging. I certainly don’t know what the income-maximizing or profit-maximizing prices would be. (I might have guessed a fraction of those prices… but it could be that the audience willing to pay anything meaningful is super limited, and willing to pay that much.)
  • Aaron Bell
    Aaron Bell Posts: 95
    Is there a reason why you don’t reveal who is behind the website?
  • Simon Cozens
    Simon Cozens Posts: 793
    300dpi scans are somewhat on the low side for a type reference.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,015
    For text faces, definitely. Especially for people wanting to do revivals.

    Fine for display faces, though. (IMO.)

    There is a not-yet-fully-enabled concept for being able to request a high-res scan. I would hope they would have those higher-res scans done up front for everything, just not hooked up to the online viewing. For download only, no human intervention or delays.

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