codeman38 / March 11, 2005 @ 8:27 pm

I haven’t ever purchased a font on its own, but I have used commercial fonts bundled with other applications– such as the Bitstream library included with CorelDraw, and the fonts included with various Adobe apps– as well as commercial font bundles, such as Infinitype from Brendel/URW.

I wish Emigre would release some free samples of its fonts. But I doubt they’re ever going to do that…

jen / March 11, 2005 @ 8:36 pm

I’m addicted to FontDiner.com - Have all but the Doggie Bag bundle. My husband and I have used every one at least once. Actually, those are the only fonts I have ever purchased.

forrest / March 11, 2005 @ 9:48 pm

I would love to own the entire Storm Type Collection (so far I own their Czech Type Collection, and love it to death), as well as all of the typefaces on http://www.romana-hamburg.de/ (I have a passion for blackletter type). I’ve probably spent about a grand on type so far this year, and I’ll buy a font if I think it’s novel, well-made, and useful. (Some fonts I’ve bought this year, not from Storm: TF Grayletter from treacyfaces.com, Gothic Gothic from Typeco, Brauhaus from MADType, and PhrackSle from Ingrimayne, all available from myfonts.com).

I don’t actually want any foundries to offer their type for free, because as an aspiring type designer, I’d rather see type designers fat and happy than get a bunch of fonts for free myself. That said, I’d love it if the type from The Enschede Font Foundry (http://www.teff.nl/) were a bit cheaper. Their fonts are beautiful and fantastically expensive: 2800 euros for the complete Trinité family?.

joey / March 11, 2005 @ 10:12 pm

damn, forrest, it’s only march. i haven’t even spent a grand on rent yet!

Michael / March 12, 2005 @ 6:48 am

I’ve not been in a position to really be able to afford to get the kind of font collection i’d like to have so i’ve just surfed for freebies.

i wish Linotype would freebie some of thier stuff!

mitten / March 12, 2005 @ 8:13 am

I love the P22 foundry, and have purchased a number of their fonts. http://p22.com

It’s too late to join for this year, but they do a membership club thing (http://p22.com/members/club.html) where you pay for a membership, get a few fonts free and discounts on the rest of the catalog. It’s not too shabby - keep it in mind for next year.

I’d love to see a couple Linotype freebies too. I don’t mind paying for sturdy, daily-use kinds of fonts, but it’s always nice to get a little something extra from foundries. It’s a feel-good thing.

Brian Donnelly / March 12, 2005 @ 8:42 am

I purchase quite a few fonts. I do freelance design work for print/web, so I have to. Can’t rely on freeware fonts for professional headline/text work. Freeware fonts are good for pixel fonts (althought the one I rely on most I purchased mini7 from miniml.com).

In the last two years fonts I have purchased include:
Gotham from typography.com
Neue Helvetica through paratype.com
Aaux Pro and many pthers through T26.com (who should give some freebies!)
A few good ones at MacRhino.com
I picked up Officina some where too; and a few weights of Metron which is an awesome font.

I have a huge type library come to think of…

I love freeware stuff for grungy, techno, dingbats, etc. But for solid text work in many weight you need to buy a few core fonts. Arial and Times New Roman just don’t cut it…

Stephen / March 12, 2005 @ 9:05 am

I don’t purchase fonts myself, and I typically don’t scourge font sites. That’s where fontleech comes in. ;-) I never have felt the need to purchase a commercial font because there is always a good and free alternative. I’ve got a request for you guys, though– I’d like a really good and free true Helvetica font. I’ve been using Pali Helvetica, but I notice it’s not exactly the same as Helvetica.

mancide / March 12, 2005 @ 10:25 am

I’ve never purchased a font yet, but I’ve come damn close to buying some chank fonts before. I really used to only use his free fonts until I stumbled upon this site.

http://chank.com/

Fogfish / March 12, 2005 @ 11:46 am

I buy fonts as necessary. Becuase I can use outlines, I have the benefit of using both Postscript and Truetype fonts. I only buy Postscript versions though. Foundries I buy from are: Fontshop, Emigre, and T26.

housepig / March 12, 2005 @ 12:21 pm

the only individual font I’ve purchased was Chank’s Lambrettista, and it was actually to get the Chank shirt that was bundled with it.

as a casual user / armchair designer, I can’t justify spending money on fonts to use in contexts where I’m not getting paid. if I made my living in graphic design, I’d budget for fonts just like I’d budget for software upgrades, Xacto knives or paper.

codeman38 / March 13, 2005 @ 9:48 am

Stephen: URW’s NimbusSanL, included with Artifex’s GhostPCL font set, is a reasonably good clone of Helvetica– it is from a major foundry, after all!

Look here: http://artifex.com/downloads/

It’s available in both TrueType and PostScript format.

John Athayde / March 13, 2005 @ 12:25 pm

I’ve purchased a few fonts, most recently from LetterheadFonts.com (”Billhead”). In general, I find it somewhat unnerving that clients will typically not want to pay for purchasing a font the same way they would pay for a stock photograph. The “I’ve got hundreds of fonts on my computer, you can use some of those.”

Without education (which is generally not worth it), it takes forever to learn a client on why they should do something (forget the hows).

artanova / March 13, 2005 @ 5:24 pm

purchased “conduit family” to do a magazine … rest is freebies and downloads using limewire.

Derek / March 14, 2005 @ 6:28 am

My wife purchased one of those “1,000 Font” CDs for next to nothing, and we got what we payed for. Generally, the fonts aren’t what I’d call “industrial strength”. Plus, the browser that comes with the fonts doesn’t work, so we have to manually inspect the cryptically named files.

If I made more of a living in graphic design, I would buy fonts in a heartbeat. Right now, I prefer to download free one-offs from various sites: p22.com, astigmatic.com, et. al.

orangeguru / March 14, 2005 @ 11:27 am

Overall I buy fonts based on projects/clients - and what I need. I like to buy stuff from small guys if possible, because I don’t like the big shops. Usually I think 30 to 90 Euro is more then enough for a font (family). I am no longer so ‘religious’ about fonts as I used to be - since there are so many of them and they come and go out of fashion much faster. Plus Clients don’t care about font’s that much either …

pablohoney77 / March 15, 2005 @ 8:37 pm

as someone who makes a living making fonts, i’m glad that some people DO pay for fonts. i just bought Underware’s BelloPro from veer this weekend and i’d say that it’s worth the $$$. i could make crappy free fonts in my sleep, but for something sublimely crafted you gotta pay.

Adam M. / March 18, 2005 @ 4:57 pm

I very nearly purchased the whole Tribute family here recently. Tribute is very similar to Day Roman (which I love), but with a true italic and a more extensive set of ligatures and “expert” characters.

The whole shebang is only $95 if you buy direct from Emigre, but I have more important things to spend my money on right now. Day Roman is really a better font anyway. Unfortunately Apostrophic Labs appears to be defunct, so an italic of Day is probably not going to happen.

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia. The text file included with Day Roman is dated in 2002, a year before Emigre came out with Tribute. Both cite the typefaces of 16th-century punchcutter François Guyot as their inspiration. Weird synchronicity, or a case of the big guys ripping off a little guy?

obinow / March 21, 2005 @ 3:56 am

can someone please help me, am in a soup…
i have downloaded a few .ttf files and saved them in my font folder(c:windows/fonts) yet am unable to use them… i have microsoft word 2002 version 10.2627.2625 along with the os as windows 98 se. i have tried changing the .ttf properties to read-only, archive, none , still to no respite….please help

Cindy / March 21, 2005 @ 10:31 am

I am looking for a font called Chili Pepper. I used to have it then when computers were upgraded it got lost. Anybody know where to find it?

Cindy / March 21, 2005 @ 10:45 am

You might already have the answer, just incase not here is what you need to do.
1. open up fonts fold
2. open File
3. click on Install Fonts
From there you can browse where you saved the fonts (My Documents, A drive, etc.)

Hope this helps.

obinow / March 21, 2005 @ 10:21 pm

cindy, thanks for the reply, yet no respite, in windows 98se the option to install the font does’nt appear.if i open .ttf(true type font file) a popup window with the font details and true type face in different pica versions come up…yet all the office xp,photoshop, coreldraw, autocad, etc, are not recognising the format.

are you looking for chili pepper or chilli pepper?(do you remember the designer, foundry, classification?, the search would be easier then)
see if these links help….
http://www.fonts.com/findfonts/search.htm
http://www.masterstech-home.com/The_Library/Font_Samples/Font_Indices/Image_Pages/C/ChiliPepperDingbats.html
http://www.masterstech-home.com/The_Library/Font_Samples/Font_Indices/Image_Pages/C/ChiliPepperDingbats.html

fontana / March 31, 2005 @ 5:12 pm

Perhaps it is not the one you have misplaced, but there was a lookalike font called “Chili Pepper” in the old Swfte CD collection. The original it “looked like” is Emigre’s “Remedy.” A lawsuit by several font vendors acting together effectively put Swfte out of business, alledging the Swfte faces were not merely look-alikes, which are legal under U.S. law — but illegal clones made by copying copyrighted code.

There are two other lookalikes of this design, not necessarily illegal clones, WSI “FunStuff,” and the Brendel font “Troubador” sold later by Canon, Greenstreet, and Summitsoft.

Hope this helps. With this information, you can broaden your search by adding three more names (the original and two look-alikes). Maybe it will even help you locate your own misplaced copy.

If you cannot find yours or a freebie, new and used CDs of Swfte, WSI, and Summitsoft faces are frequently sold very inexpensively for from $5 to $20 (places like eBay, Best Buy, CompUSA), and the quality is sometimes quite good, unlike the “junk” CDs of renamed freeware and shareware.

Good luck

hagfish / April 3, 2005 @ 9:33 am

I just love the art of letterform design; and oh girls and boys, yes, I have purchased thousands of fonts. I’ve never counted, but I may own more purchased, licensed fonts than I have fonts downloaded as freeware. I am certain that I USE my purchased fonts more than my free ones, even though I do regularly use some of my free favorites.

Like your first respondent codeman38, I’ve purchased my commercial fonts almost completely in separate collections and bundles with other software, like the Bitstream 500 CD from several years ago, and the huge “Illustrator” collection which Adobe sold me in conjunction with an upgrade to Pagemaker 5.0. Before Adobe Type Manager was free, I also bought whatever fonts Adobe put on special every time an early version was upgraded. That was probably over 25 faces. The list goes on: Just about the complete URW library came with my old version of Deneba Canvas (they don’t include that bundle anymore). Some real dandies from Monotype, Agfa, URW, and elsewhere came bundled with MS Home Publishing, Corel Draw, Sierra Print Artist, and others. (I’ve purchased several graphics software packages I don’t use just to get the fonts bundle which came with them. Of course, a few of those were “free with rebate.”) I’ve really been surprised how many bundles with inexpensive products include “big name” first-quality faces instead of cheap look-likes with amusing names.

I’ve also purchased “look alike” collections from Clickart, Swfte, SoftKey, SoftMaker, WSI, Arts & Letters, Summitsoft, and Tiger Direct’s discontinued Expressiv line. With those sets, sone faces are good quality; some inferior, on the same disc. I bought the Ingrimayne collection direct from Robert Schenk, the professor/artist who drew all those original faces. Back when foundries sold “unlocking” CDs, I also bought those from Adobe, Monotype, Linotype, Creative Alliance, Image Club, Precision Type, and others. I used the “free with purchase” unlocks to “plug gaps” in my collection. I bought all three Monotype “Fun Fonts” collections, two early TTF sets by Agfa, and a pack from Microsoft that had Bigelow & Holmes Lucida in it. Out of certainly more than 10,000 fonts I’ve bought, I have probably purchased fewer than 20 fonts individually, not in some kind of discounted collection.

Finally, I look for the best free original fonts sites, like Typoasis, where hundreds, maybe thousands, of very classy free faces await. I really appreciate too, commercial vendors who give free samples, like Harolds, Nicks, FontShop, and many more. Letraset used to give away a different face every month; now they stick to just one for months or years, and it isn’t easy to find the URL anymore: http://www.letraset.com/us/info/treasure/index.asp

If I were to add up the current individual retail prices for just the “big name” foundry fonts I have purchased or received direct-from-vendor, it might be more than $20,000. However, because I waited for bargains (not because I am patient, just because I could not afford full price for the extensive collection I wanted), those vendors freely sold me my collection for little more than $700, less than 5% of today’s full retail price for separately-sold fonts — and that spread over nearly ten years. Once I own it, I hang onto it.

All the fonts I use for work or fun are licensed — either purchased or freeware or samples commercial vendors have given away on diskettes or by download. I am not only not using unlicensed commercial faces, I am not even using a fraction of the licensed fonts I have purchased. But I do like having the big collection, and sometimes I study them just for pleasure (uninstalled) with font preview software. (”Do these fonts make me look fat?”)

With the Corel bundle, one or two other good bundles, and some of the best freeware, you can produce lovely documents for all occasions. You can limit any commercial faces you buy to those you love or for paid design work. No one absolutely has to spend even what I have, at the steep discounts I’ve enjoyed, unless they want to. Free and cheap fonts are adequate for almost all home work and a good part of smaller commercial jobs. Some commercial faces are uniquely distinctive, but there is almost always a freeware face suitable for the same purpose even when it is not an exact look-alike.

I would really, really, really have to fall in love with a font to buy one separately for $25 a face or more, or $75 per family or more. I suppose it could happen. I don’t object to paying for fonts I like priced at $2 to $10 per font, but I normally don’t even do that if there’s comparably useful freeware or a look-alike already in my collection. I agree with the conventional wisdom and would buy premium, standard faces if I were laying out a volume-circulation slick national magazine or consulting on major corporation identity documents. The best fonts would be a small part of the whole cost for such projects. But even though you usually “get what you pay for,” I do believe that at least SOME of the freeware is (not just “as good as” but) BETTER quality than some of the premium commercial stuff, even from major foundries! Caveat emptor.

Thank you, Joey! I am SO looking forward to regularly checking your site!

Hugs.

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