mark / April 22, 2005 @ 12:03 pm

I say give them away. It gives attention to your website/blog and it lets potential clients see your handywork—leading them to have you create them a custom font for their company. (cha-ching)

Hans / April 22, 2005 @ 3:47 pm

I’m not a designer, but I like the idea of giving away just one weight of a font (as with District Thin)… If I had the money to spare, I’d go ahead and buy the entire District family. Oh, and make sure it’s not the “regular” weight… Because that’s the most important weight of all! You want the customers to buy the family mainly because they want the regular weight.

Just some ponderings from a consumer.

forrest / April 22, 2005 @ 5:54 pm

I’m in the process of designing my first type family, and even though it’s likely to have a pretty limited audience (assuming I can ever get it done), I’m probably going to end up charging about $20 per weight for the individual faces (it’s only going to be a three to five weight system, though). I’m putting a lot of care and effort into it, I’m basing my design on old models but reinterpeting them rather than creating a straight-up revival, and I’m creating what I think will be a novel and pretty interesting system for setting certain kinds of text. In other words, I’m taking the whole process seriously, spending a lot of my own time on it, and I want other people to take what I’m doing seriously too.

While I like the idea of giving away a single weight, as Hans suggests, there are situations in which it doesn’t really make sense. The fonts I’m developing will be OpenType and will heavily leverage OpenType features, so there will be a lot more to each font than is usual (I’m experimenting with some interesting things involving the small caps and stylistic alternates, similar to what John Butler did with the OpenType version of Mrs Eaves. Giving away a single weight would be similar to giving away the whole font. Also, since I’m hoping the design will be new and distinctive, I’m hoping that’s worth something too.

As to whether I’d ever give away a font, that’s a tough question. My basic feeling is that as long as we’re living in a capitalist society, if it’s worth my time and effort to create a typeface, it’s worth something to me, at least, and therefore might be to other people as well. I’ll probably never be a full-time type designer (very few people are), but the more money coming in from design projects, the more time I can spend working on design. I guess if I were going to do a free typeface, it would have to be one I designed to be free from the outset. I could see myself creating a free face to demonstrate OpenType features, or to contribute to an open source software project, or something similar. If I were to do that, I think it would be only fair to bring the same attention to detail to the project that I would to any of the designs I’d like to make money from.

AmyK / April 22, 2005 @ 9:08 pm

Hey, I started a similar discussion at Typophile:
http://www.typophile.com/forums/messages/30/69655.html?1114216992
check it out!

Jon Hicks / April 23, 2005 @ 2:21 am

I give a font away for free on my site called ‘Hill House’, based on Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s famous handwriting:

http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/downloads/fonts

The reason its free is simple. Its my first and only font, and as such isn’t professionally kerned and bit thrown together!

Tim to be / April 24, 2005 @ 4:24 am

AmyK you retarded or something?

Jay / April 24, 2005 @ 10:21 am

I got into type design about a year and a half ago, and have struggled with the idea of posting my work online. I have decided not to, mainly because I tend to use them for my own design work. At some point, however, I will be sharing these with the world, and the decisions will go like this, I think:

FREE
1.) Crummy quality/limited character sets
2.) Scanned from old type samples without significant reworking/new character generation
3.) Lousy kerning/metrics

UNFREE
1.) A completely original face or family with some merit/value (I’ll make that call when the day comes, I suppose)
2.) A significant amount of reworking and original characters added to an existing alphabet. (like if I started a new take on a face, not a straight duplicate with extra characters)

I guess a single weight of a family given away is a good thing… I recently needed 2 more weights of district and bought the package, so it seems Phil is doing something right.

I doubt I would offer an archive, though. It seems the foundries that “rotate” free faces might encourage more visits.

Dan Reynolds / April 24, 2005 @ 12:47 pm

Tim to be, your comment to AmyK was just rude…

Otherwise, I have been enjoying this conversation, both here and in its iterations on Typophile. Like Forrest, I am a novice type designer. I have had several people ask me for copies of my fonts. I have only given them to other designers who I know personally.

I would never post one of my fonts online for free, unrestricted download. Many designers who are just starting out do this, because (like Jay pointed out) they don’t think that there fonts are very good. The problem is, once you put a font out there on the market, you’ll never know what happens to the font. Your name will be “attached” to the font forever. If/when you do later sell commercial fonts, your previous “bastard” children will still be out and about, and the quality of your work will be judged by both of them.

Jay / April 24, 2005 @ 10:04 pm

Hrm… it isn’t that I don’t think my design isn’t very good, Dan — but rather that there are typefaces that I’ve put a good deal of work into, and others that were an experiment, exercise or whim.

That said, however, the point about “bastards” is well taken. I wonder if Frutiger was ever bummed when he came across Initiales Phoebus…

Jay / April 24, 2005 @ 10:06 pm

Argh… triple negative.

forrest / April 25, 2005 @ 2:12 pm

If Dan’s a novice, I’m a… a… petitioner? Probationer? I’ve seen examples of his work, and he’s too modest. Also, Dan, isn’t one of your blackletters out and about in the world? Meanwhile, I have no complete designs, and most of my font-design time is spent swearing at recalcitrant Bézier curves. Conjuring up a typeface from scratch is hard work when you have the drafting skills of a three-year-old.

There’s a nugget of truth in his argument I’d like to expand upon. I have enough experience in the arts to know that, perverse as it may sound, it’s awfully hard to get people to take you seriously if you give away your products or services for free. Even charging a nominal fee makes what you’re doing seem more “real” or “professional”. The converse of this is that you should never sell something in bad conscience; slapping a price tag on any old random crap you feel like disgorging unto the world isn’t going to do your self-esteem, your reputation, or your bank account any favors. This is why I said I wouldn’t release a font for free unless I was willing to charge money for it first. Otherwise, Dan is right: your poor little misbegotten bastards will forever be wandering around, getting themselves into trouble and sullying your good name, all because you didn’t take the time to raise them right. (It sounds kind of icky and reactionary when I put it that way, though.)

Dan Reynolds / April 26, 2005 @ 1:22 pm

I don’t mean to imply that anyones typefaces aren’t worthy of sale or distribution. There are plenty of typefaces on the market that aren’t of the highest quality, so to speak (design and/or technically speaking).

However, I do mean to imply that some people are too quick to “want” to see their products being used by others. Sometimes, it might be better to not give away your first font. Or maybe even your tenth. Your later ones will be better. Really. There is a learning curve.

I know that this realization can hurt. But just because we make things, it doesn’t mean that they are intrinsically good! I’m flattered, Forrest, that you find my proto-typeface ideas worth mentioning. Ignaz Textura will not be coming out into the world anytime soon, though. Not unless I throw it all away and start over first! (I based the work on a gravestone from 1519… after about a year or so of tweaking, I set the same lines of text that were on my inspirational source. Let’s just say that, sadly, the “original” looked way better. sigh… such is life!) I have already started on more promising, perhaps easier projects. There will be other blackletters, though.

misnomer / February 13, 2006 @ 5:40 am

as far as im concerned typefaces are everyones domain, to me its a crime to make people pay for a typeface,

In the old days if you where good enough you just copied other peoples typeface, if you liked franklin gothic, you cut it out and used it..

this whole ‘pay for font’ thing is complete bullshit.

if you have the right font dosent mean youll have the right design.

its hard enough without the right fonts to be a good designer…

i just really hate this idea you should hide away developments in type, that happened almost half a century ago, what about copyright.!!!!! for god sake it only lasts 50 years in my country ..that includes typefaces.

look at a typeface like franklin gothic… my font will make you pay for that..

or even grotesque sans family..those fonts where developed before the turn of the century!!!!!! when people thought sans was grotesque..and they charge people for that!!!

to me that is just WRONG….. theres nobody even alive left when that typeface was invented… but people still charge you for it..