Embeddable fonts and web fonts: licensing, price and requirements

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1

I’m a type designer on the verge of launching a type foundry. Having 10 years experience in graphic design, I know how crippling and frustrating dealing with type foundries can be once you go outside the established comfort zone. Licensing type for the web has had a recent upturn with @font-face and renting services, but app development and ebooks are still largely uncharted territory. Us type designers have a tendency to keep to ourselves, and perhaps it’s fear of piracy and new technology – I’m not sure – but licensing and pricing is still a touchy subject among Typophiles. I’m here because I’d like to hear the devs own thoughts on these subjects.

Here’s some questions to get you started. Please do add your own!

On web fonts:
How would you like to license type for web? What requirements do you have? What are the pros and cons of current solutions?
Does poor rendering in Windows XP (Greyscaled or binary, Standard GDI) bother you?
Does large file size and slow loading bother you?

On app/ebook fonts:
How should type designers ideally approach this? Would you consider paying for embeddable fonts? How much is a reasonable license for a large commercial project? How much for a low-level or non-commercial projects?
How should the price be calculated? Would you like to be able to select the relevant embeddable license in the checkout (likehow retail licenses are handled) or would you like to negotiate on per project basis?

Apologies for my poor English.

F

2

Hi Frode Bo Helland. Welcome to the forums. :slight_smile:

These are some pretty big issues you are raising! I can only speak as a web designer, so …

How would you like to license type for web? What requirements do you have? What are the pros and cons of current solutions?

I’ve used a few services so far, including FontSquirrel and Google fonts (free), FontDeck and TypeKit (commercial). For me, FontSquirrel is the best, being (for me) the most reliable and free. But I can understand why font designers want a piece of the action. If I were using a lot of fonts like this, I might favor the TypeKit model, where you pay a yearly license to use as many fonts as you like. But because I use very few, I kind of prefer FontDeck, as you pay just for the font you want to use, and it’s just a few dollars per year.

But for me, the ideal is to be able to host the fonts on my own site, which is partly why I like the FontSquirrel setup.