Italify – now available

SCarewe
SCarewe Posts: 83
in Type Design Software

A while back, I made an initial post about my newest tool: Italify. Today, after lots of additional development, Italify is out of the service model and can be directly installed and used in Glyphs.

Screenshot 2026-07-17 at 112232

The plugin allows you to generate optically corrected obliques in a fraction of the time you’d usually spend, at very high quality. From my experience with many clients who used the service, it can get you up to 95% of the way to the final oblique, depending on the design and your taste.

Italify can currently be licensed per week (unlimited masters) or per master (unlimited time). Contact me for custom licences (monthly, yearly…). The current pricing is deliberately aimed at foundries working on custom jobs, as a way to trial the plugin and workflow, collect feedback and improve the algorithm.

A handbook, a fully functional free trial (48h), licensing information and a Python API documentation are all available on the website.

I’m happy to give demos and introductions in person (Paris/Berlin/London) or by video, just contact me.

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Comments

  • Adam Ladd
    Adam Ladd Posts: 294
    Cool! The site has some nice animated examples too, to help visualize.
    Maybe I've overlooked something, and know it's early, but curious about any thoughts on its potential for serif designs?
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 83
    You can try it on your serif design. Technically, it's possible – Italify doesn't know what kind of design you have, it only sees path segments. You could run it on icons, if you wish.

    Whether it really makes sense for your design is a different question, and the results are definitely not what one would normally expect for a true serif italic.

    Italify "only" corrects the distortion of slanted shapes, it doesn't change anything about the fundamental design.

    I'd be curious to see what you end up using it on!
  • Adam Ladd
    Adam Ladd Posts: 294
    Gotcha. Thanks for your feedback and thoughts!
  • Christian Thalmann
    Christian Thalmann Posts: 2,074
    That looks super useful! The price is a bit steep for my level of type design, unfortunately.
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 83
    edited July 17
    Yes, I'm sorry about that. For the time being, this pricing is intentionally steep, as it is aimed at larger foundries with time pressure (or ridiculous amounts of masters to process). I want to keep the user group small, so that I can react to feedback and bug reports sensibly, before potentially rolling it out on a larger scale.

    I will be transparent and say that I don't think a general one-time purchase is fair when licensing to big foundries. My reference (in terms of time saved and quality delivered) is iKern, which has operated on a similar model for ages. I still need to figure out how to do that, while also offering cheap one-time (?) purchases for the more general public.

    You are more than welcome to 1) try the 48h trial, and 2) get in touch with me directly to negotiate a (much) smaller fee. I'm not a complicated guy in that regard, promise.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,375
    edited July 17
    I haven’t tried it yet, but Sebastian used it as a service to italify two masters for me, and it was, as he says, “95%” —which is all that one can expect anyway, given the idiosyncrasies of “design and taste.”
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 83
    Thank you very much for corroborating my pretentious claim, Nick! :)
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,731
    edited July 18
    With the per-master credit pricing model, does this continue to work when a master is extended? For example, if I have a Latin master, use Italify with it, then add Cyrillic later: can I apply Italify to the new Cyrillic portion of the master with the same credit?
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 83
    Yes, that's the idea. You licence a master once and can use Italify on it perpetually, no matter whether you add glyphs to it or whatever else.

    You can also cheat the system by adding your entire library into one master, running Italify and then splitting the file again. But I like to trust my users :)
  • David Sargent
    David Sargent Posts: 2
    Nick Shinn said:
    I haven’t tried it yet, but Sebastian used it as a service to italify two masters for me, and it was, as he says, “95%” —which is all that one can expect anyway, given the idiosyncrasies of “design and taste.”
    +1 on how good Sebastian's process is, he Italified two masters for me and it saved me so much time and (importantly) mental load. I was really hoping the plugin would be priced similar to something like Kern On, but understand why it isn't. Congrats on getting to this stage Sebastian!
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 83
    Thank you very much, David!

    I plan on implementing a pricing based on foundry size, but there are a lot of open questions.

    Regarding Kern On/RMX: I quite simply think that those plugins are far, far too cheaply priced compared the the immense value they provide, especially to larger foundries.

    Again, feel free to get in touch with me, usually even just a "Hello" by mail will make me hand out massive discounts :)
  • Ermin Međedović
    Ermin Međedović Posts: 107
    David Sargent said:
    Nick Shinn said:
    I haven’t tried it yet, but Sebastian used it as a service to italify two masters for me, and it was, as he says, “95%” —which is all that one can expect anyway, given the idiosyncrasies of “design and taste.”
    +1 on how good Sebastian's process is, he Italified two masters for me and it saved me so much time and (importantly) mental load. I was really hoping the plugin would be priced similar to something like Kern On, but understand why it isn't. Congrats on getting to this stage Sebastian!

    +1. I’ve been working with Sebastian for several years now, and I intend to continue doing so. We’ve already discussed the pricing of Italify, and for the time being I’ve decided to leave the obliques process to him. The quality of his work has always been excellent.

  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 83
    Thank you everyone for your great feedback, I really appreciate it.

    Admittedly, the master licences are based on the service pricing I had, which people told me was pretty cheap.

    If somebody wants to say (this is your chance to shape the pricing to your advantage!):
    What would a sensible rate be? Bearing in mind that I would like to keep the time-based plus master-based licensing model. Would a monthly or yearly licence be interesting?

    Very happy to hear your thoughts and adjust the pricing accordingly. Thanks a lot!
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,731
    Re. the pricing, I understand where you are coming from in terms of the plugin use license being related to the price of the service, but that means separating the value of the tool from the value of your labour in some way. If I use the plugin, rather than paying you to use the plugin, I am doing the labour part. I don’t have a sense of how much work is involved in things like structure tagging, so can’t say whether the license pricing is reasonable independent of the labour.

    I suspect it feels odd to some people to have a plugin cost more than the app in which it runs, but in general the pricing of font tools is weird.
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 83
    Yes. I agree on the notion that the pricing for the service can't be a direct indicator of the price of just the plugin.

    In all transparency: the labour involved in processing a font is pretty minimal. As you will see from the handbook, there is a tagging process involved, which you do for one single master (per set of compatible masters). Then you just run the plugin once on all masters. For a project with around 200 paths, I would estimate about an hour end-to-end, independent of master count.

    Learning the tagger interface is a bit of one-time work, of course. I will record some video material to go through a typical workflow, once I have some time.

    I could also simply go back to offering it solely as a service (like iKern), which frankly would be a very comfortable goldmine, but I 1) don't want to spend my days doing only that, and 2) wanted to respond to the demand of people asking for the plugin directly.

    If anybody wants to share some concrete numbers in regards to pricing, I'd be very happy to hear from you. Thanks!
  • Typedesigner
    Typedesigner Posts: 119
    edited July 21
    Interesting plugin. A lifetime license of around €99 would seem more realistic. Most foundries don't develop italics regularly, and those that do already have established workflows. In FontLab 8, for example, Briem’s method can be implemented by creating an Action that combines multiple commands, with good results—especially for rounded glyphs.
    Compared to something like Kern-On, this is a much more niche product with a considerably smaller audience.
  • Xiaoyuan
    Xiaoyuan Posts: 6
    edited July 21
    I would buy it if it's around €100 for lifetime. If you want to reach very small-scale designers who have limited means to produce typefaces, (have limited money to hire people to do the technical jobs already, they have to do everything themselves), this price is affordable and will help their workflow to be able to reduce the tedious work making italic. and i think with this price you will have many sales, although it's probably not the price you aim for...

    Of course bigger companies should pay more, this pricing is not for them.
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 83
    edited July 21
    That's my main issue. How do I offer licences to individual designers at an affordable rate while also selling enterprise licences to big foundries? They could simply buy the cheap option (or their in-house designers use their personal licences), there's no way for me to enforce this.

    So I'm currently starting from the other end: enterprise licences first. Individual licences on request (again – simply reach out to me, I'm more than happy to negotiate a considerably cheaper licence for smaller foundries).

    By the way, concerning the "established workflows", I'm well aware of this, but these workflows fall extremely short of the results Italify delivers. Especially concerning speed. Example: I recently ran the 60+ masters of Roboto Delta through Italify (quadratic outlines!) – in three minutes, on my MacBook Air. That's three seconds per master. This doesn't even take into account that Italify also corrects diagonals, which I don't think any other algorithm does :)
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,511
    How about a one-time, per family rate that is reasonable?
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 83
    What do you mean by "per family"? Per file (font family)? Surname (family business foundry)?

    This is impossible to do technically, in a sensible way. A family could be many masters, and/or spread over several files.

    I think gauging the scope by master count makes the most sense. I price the service by that, additionally taking into account the path count. I'm already leaving the latter out for the plugin price, only calculating based on the master count, which I think is a sensible balance between accurate scope and simplicity.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,511
    As a potential user, I have to view the cost of your product in correlation to what profit I might make from adding an italic font to a family. In my experience, oblique fonts sell far less than their upright version. If the cost of your service is so much that it nearly absorbs the profit, I am not seeing the value in purchase. This may well be because I am a one-person shop. Perhaps there is a price model you can come up with for those of us running small foundries?
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 83
    Quick note: I don't understand what the "Disagree" reactions are for – what part do you disagree on? That master count is not a sensible way of gauging project scope?

    Chris: Yes, absolutely, I understand that, and it is my main concern. I would like to make this financially fair to both parties (the foundry selling the oblique, but also the tool developer facilitating it, i.e. myself).

    For the time being, as I said, my goal is precisely to cater to large foundries, and not (yet) smaller ones/individuals, so pricing is currently achieving its goal. Multiple foundries are very happy with the pricing, and I of course hear the feedback of those that are not, and I will adjust accordingly. It's a very tricky thing to price well, as I'm now learning.

    Thanks again everybody for all the insight.
  • Jesse R Ewing
    Jesse R Ewing Posts: 16
    For us smaller foundries, pricing per master still seems overly expensive. I would much prefer to see a per family price like Chris mentioned. I understand what you're going for, and it looks like a great tool, but as it stands, I'll probably just check back in at a later date to see where you've arrived with a public-facing pricing structure that takes into account the financial realities of smaller shops.
  • Kris Sowersby
    Kris Sowersby Posts: 51
    That's my main issue. How do I offer licences to individual designers at an affordable rate while also selling enterprise licences to big foundries? They could simply buy the cheap option (or their in-house designers use their personal licences), there's no way for me to enforce this.
    This is the same problem every foundry faces when selling fonts. You pretty much have to trust people to do the right thing. In your case you’re selling a niche product to a niche audience, there’s not a lot of scope for people to take the piss. 

  • Kris Sowersby
    Kris Sowersby Posts: 51
    I know this is an annoying question… but do you have plans to develop it for RoboFont? It looks really good!
  • peternowell
    peternowell Posts: 11
    edited July 22
    Congratulations on launching this, Sebastian! Pricing a font tool is basically impossible, but you can try different approaches over time. What matters most is what you’ve built—which is clearly sophisticated, well-designed, and deeply informed by your experience as a font engineer. Bravo! I look forward to seeing where this goes!
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 83
    Mini update, the plugin now works in Glyphs 4 and is available directly from the plugin manager.

    Other minor update: a 48h trial now starts when you actually enter the code, not when you request the code. Sorry about that initial behaviour.
  • Typedesigner
    Typedesigner Posts: 119
    The question is: What makes your plugin significantly better than the new Slanter filter included in Glyphs 4?

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